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THE 



HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY 



AN 



EXPOSURE 



OF THE 



FALSIFICATIONS AND PERVERSIONS 



OF THE 



SLANDERERS OF HUNGARY, 



BY ROBERT CARTER. 



BOSTON : 

REDDING & COMPANY, 8 STATE STREET. 

18 5 2. 



THE 



HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY : 



AN 



EXPOSURE 



OF THE 



FALSIFICATIONS AND PERVERSIONS 



OF THE 



SLANDERERS OF HUNGARY. 









BOSTON j 

REDDING & COMPANY, 8 STATE STREET. 

1852. 



This pamphlet is not a history of the Hungarian War, nor even, except incidentally, a 
defense of the motives and character of the Patriots and Heroes of that war. The great mass 
of the American people are well satisfied that the contest between Hungary and the House 
of Hapsburg, was a contest for Freedom and Democratic Institutions, against Despot- 
ism, Usurpation and Perfidy. That there are any among us who entertain different 
sentiments, is owing altogether to the labors of the North American Review, and the New 
York Courier and Enquirer, the editors of which, Messrs. Bowen and Webb, from motives 
that I need not discuss, have seen fit to oppose themselves to the general opinion, not of this 
country only, but of the civilized world. Their attacks upon the Hungarians have been widely 
and zealously circulated — Mr. Bo wen's articles, I am told, having been distributed as a pam- 
phlet distinct from the Review in which they appeared. The calumnies thus propagated 
have found their way even into the Senate of the United States, and have there been urged in 
debate, in opposition to the Resolution of Welcome to Kossuth. 

Messrs. Bowen and Webb rely for support of their theories on quotations from a number 
of books and documents of more or less authority, from which they have culled such passages 
as would serve their purpose, and have paraded them as conclusive evidence against the 
Hungarians. The best reply to this line of argument, in my judgment, is a critical examina- 
tion of these "authorities," and an exposure of the mode in which the quotations from them 
have been made. This is what I have attempted to do, — with what success the reader can 
determine for himself. 

I have likewise devoted considerable space to the consideration of Mr. Bowen's grossly un- 
fair reply to Mrs. Putnam, who, in the Christian Examiner, had criticised his articles on Hun- 
gary with eminent ability, and with a degree of knwledge on the subject to which no 
other American can pretend. It will be seen that on every point which he has endeavored 
to make against her, I have shown that she is right and he wrong, by the very testimony to 
which he himself appeals. 

I have endeavored, in conclusion, to give briefly a plain and accurate statement of the case 
between Austria and Hungary, and of the true causes and objects of the Hungarian Revolu- 
tion. To those who desire full and reliable information on these subjects, however, I recom- 
mend a book recently published at Philadelphia, " Hungary and Kossuth? by Rev. Dr. Tefft, 
of Cincinnati. 

A considerable portion of the following essay appeared last winter in the Boston Atlas, but as 
the controversy to which it relates is now more fully than ever before the public, it is not 
inopportune to republish what was then written. 

Cambridge Mass., Dec. 24, 1851, 

R.a 



IV? 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



MR. BOWEN'S FIRST AND SECOND ARTICLES. 



The attack upon the Hungarians was begun in 
this country by Mr. Francis Bowen, with an 
article, entitled— "The War of Races,"— in 
the North American Review, for January, 1850, 
which embraced, he declared in a preliminary 
letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, the re- 
sults of a good deal of " labor and research." 
Prefixed to it, by way of text, was the title of 
an able and impartial work on Hungary, by a 
French writer, M. Degerando, who had long 
resided in that country, and was probably bet- 
ter acquainted with its real condition than any 
foreigner who had yet written about it. Mr. 
Bowen stated, in the beginning of his article, 
that " we depend for information chiefly on M. 
Degerando' s book, and on a series of excellent 
articles contributed by E. de Langsdorff and H. 
Desprez to the Revue des Deux Mondes." [War 
of Races, p. 79.] These are the only authori- 
ties to whom he refers, with the exception of a 
document published in the New York Tribune, 
an incorrect translation of the Hungarian 
Declaration of Independence. 

Mr. Bowen's use of the best of these authori- 
ties, M. Degerando, is fully and correctly stated 
in the following passage from Mrs. Putnam's 
First Article in the Christian Examiner, Nov., 
1850, p. 423 : 

" The work of Degerando, which the North 
A merican Reviewer selects as the theme of his 
article, was published in 1848, before the com- 
mencement of the war, and gives no intelligence 
from Hungary later than the summer of 1847. 
It cannot, therefore supply information in regard 
to the war or its immediate causes. It con- 
tains, however, full and accurate accounts of 
the political institutions of the country, and of 
the character and condition of the various 
classes of the population. We regret that the 



Reviewer has not availed himself of the infor- 
tion thus afforded. We cannot, indeed, but 
express our surprise at the treatment which a 
writer of the high standing of Degerando, has 
received at the hands of the editor of the 
North American Review. After placing the 
title of this work at the head of his article, 
and citing the name of the author among his 
authorities, he does not again refer to it. There 
is not a statement of fact or opinion in the 
article which can be attributed to M. Deger- 
ando ; and the greater part of it is in direct 
contradiction to the statements of that author. 
Yet, though the work of M. Degerando is pro- 
fessedly under review, the writer of ' The War 
of Races ' gives no intimation that any such 
contrariety of opinion exists between himself 
and his supposed authority ; he passes no 
judgment upon the work ; he cites none of the 
author's statements, not even to controvert 
them. The charges against the Hungarians con- 
tained in that article, went forth to the world, 
therefore, with the sanction of the respected 
name of Degerando. Three months afterwards, 
in another article, written to support the asser- 
tion made in the former one, the Reviewer, for 
the first time, alludes to his dissent from the 
opinions of Degerando ; the only notice of the 
work which is supposed to make the subject of 
•The War of Races,' is to be found in a note 
to the article on 'The Politics of Europe.' " 

It appears, then, that Mr. Bowen's " labor 
and research " were confined to a few articles 
in a popular French magazine, the Revue des 
Deux Mo?ides, from which, also, he admits, he 
derived almost the whole of his " information." 
The Revue has long been notorious for its anti- 
republican tendencies, and the authors of its 
articles on Hungary, MM. de Langsdorff and 
Desprez, are royalists, apologists for Austria, 
and admirers of Haynau and Metternich. The 
use which Mr. Bowen has made of their articles, 
and the extent to which he is indebted to them 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



for " information," are so extraordinary, and 
have so decisive a bearing upon his character as 
a historian and a man of letters, as to render it 
advisable to enter at some length into an exposi- 
tion of his obligations to them. 

In " The War of Races," [pp. 106, 7, 8,] there 
is an elaborate account of a distinguished Hun- 
garian Magnate, Count Szechenyi, which in 
point of style and of information, is perhaps 
the best and most striking passage of the article. 
If original with Mr. Bowen, it would have de- 
served the credit it has received as the result of 
considerable research. It is in fact, however, 
entirely translated, without the slightest ac- 
knowledgment, from an article by M. deLangs- 
dorfFinthe Revue des Deux Monties for Decem- 



ber, 1848. Yet Mr. Bowen prints it as alto, 
gether his own production. He does not give 
the least intimation that he is indebted in its 
composition to any one, but offers it as the 
result of his own researches upon Hungarian 
history. The sketch of Szechenyi in the Revue 
fill a space equal to fifteen or twenty pages of 
the North American. Mr. Bowen's translation, 
in three pages, is of course abridged in parts,but 
it is chiefly by omissions which did not suit his 
purpose, because they were favorable to the 
Hungarians. 

I have made a literal translation of some por- 
tions of De LangsdorfFs article, that the reader 
may compare it with the corresponding passages 
of Mr. Bowen's : 



"The Danube had been, as it were, forgotten 
and neglected by the Hungarians. Repelled 
by the difficulties which its navigation present- 
ed at two or three points, they had confined 
their use of it to sending down-stream some 
bateaux de transport, and large rafts, which were 
to be broken up when they arrived at their des- 
tination. Szechenyi comprehended, as he says 
in one of his works, that here was a magnificent 
gift of Providence, which man had left unused. 
He built at Pesth a boat of a light and stout 
form, and descended with some intrepid boat- 
men, the rapids and shoals hitherto regarded as 
impracticable. There was universal enthusiasm 
in Hungary when it was known that these new 
Argonauts had happily passed the redoubtable 
Iron Gates, the last cataracts of Orschowa. 
Patriotic subscriptions were organized every- 
where in order to begin the necessary works and 
to found a navigation company ; skilful en- 
gineer's soon removed the principal obstacles, and 
within a year after the adventurous expedition 
of Szechenyi, a line of steamboats was in full 
activity upon the upper and lower Danube, 
from Ratisbon to Vienna, and from Vienna to 
Constantinople. * * * The Austrian Gov- 
ernment assisted in this movement, and con- 
tributed to the enterprise considerable funds. 
Prince Metternich figured among the first 
stockholders, though he jested sometimes upon 
the pretensions of the Hungarians 'who thought 
they had invented the Danube.' The name of 
Szechenyi was already famous ; no one knew, 
however, the extent and variety of his mind. 
At this period many of his countrymen regarded 
him only as an engineer, more skilful than 
those who had preceded him, but his political 
genius soon showed itself with that superiority 
which imposes upon the multitude the chiefs 
whom they think they choose themselves. A 
series of publications upon all the subjects 
which then occupied men's minds, established 
the political reputation of Sz6chenyi, and decid- 



" His first enterprise, commenced twenty years 
since, was an attempt to improve the navigation 
of the Danube, a work of immense importance, 
as we have shown, to the prosperity of the coun- 
try. The obstructions in the river were so great, 
that only large rafts and some bateaux were sent 
down-stream, to be broken up when they had 
once arrived at the Black Sea. Szechenyi built 
at his own expense a light and stout boat, in 
which he descended the river himself, and as- 
certained that the rocks and rapids were not so 
formidable as had been supposed. He then or- 
ganized a company for removing the greatest 
obstacles from the bed of the stream, and plac- 
ing a line of steamboats upon it. The under- 
taking had complete success, and within one 
year the boats were plying regularly from llat- 
isbon to Vienna, and from Vienna to Constanti- 
nople. The enterprise excited great enthusiasm 
in Hungary ; the Austrian government favored 
it, and contributed largely for its execution. 
Metternich himself was pleased, and became 
one of the first stockholders, though he laughed 
at the boasting of the Magyars respecting it, ( 
' who thought they had invented the Danube.' 
This work made Szechenyi very popular; but 
as yet his countrymen regarded him only as an 
able engineer. He soon showed himself, how- 
ever, a politician and publicist of the highest 
rank, by a number of pamphlets published in 
quick succession, advocating with great elo- 
quence and ability some important changes in 
the Constitution of the state and the relations 
between the peasants and the nobility. These 
pamphlets were the first productions of impor- 
tance written not in Latin or German, but in 
the Magyar tongue. * * * The brilliant 
reputation which Szechenyi acquired was earned 
as much by his temperance and his regard for 
justice and the rights of all, as by the boldness 
of the changes that he proposed. ' I wish,' he 
remarked, ' to awaken my countrymen so that 
they may walk, and not that they may throw 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



ed the rest of his life. These pamphlets were 
written, not in Latin or German, but in the 
Magyar tongue. It was the first time that works 
of such importance had been published in that 
idiom. * # * * * Szechenyi's populari- 
ty and glory were unequalled ; he was in truth 
the first citizen of his country, as this title he 
merited as much by his respect for justice and 
the rights of all, as by the boldness of his plans 
of reform. He had roused his country without 
overturning it, and such had always been his 
ambition. ' I wish to awaken my countrymen,' 
said he to a foreigner, « so that they may walk, 
and not that they may throw themselves out of 
the window.' His name was in every mouth. 
The counties vied with each other in fending 
him patriotic addresses and diplomas of citizen- 
ship, which gave him the right of voting in 
their local assemblies ; when he arrived in any 
village, the peasants with music at their head, 
went out to meet him, ail wishing to see and 
hear him, and calling him their father and their 
liberator. The Diet of Transylvania did homage 
to the eloquent publicist by sending him a 
gold pen, several feet in length ; his name 
was given to the first steamboat that furrowed 
the Danube ; the national academy, the circle 
of the nobility, and the institute of the Hunga- 
rian language, at the same time elected him 
their president. In every drawing room at 
Pesth, strangers might see an engraving repre- 
senting Szechenyi, in a sort of apotheosis, amidst 
luminous clouds ; beneath, Hungary coming out 
of chaos, and the Danube, covered by vessels 
of all nations, rolling majestically its placid 
waters adown the levelled rapids of Orschowa." 
— Revue des Deux Mondes, Tome 24, pp. 683, 684, 
6S9. 



themselves out of the window.' His popularity 
became immense. His name was in every 
mouth, and the counties vied with each other 
in sending him addresses of congratulation and 
rights of citizenship. When he arrived in any 
village, the peasants went out to meet him 
with music, and called him their father ard 
lit era tor. The Diet of Transylvania sent him 
an entire gold pen, several feet in length, and 
the national academy, the circle of the nobility 
and the institute of the Hungarian language, 
at the same time elected him their President. 
His name was given to thefir.-t steamboat which 
glided down the River Danube ; and in every 
drawing room at Pesth, the stranger might see 
an engraving in which Szechenyi appeared in a 
sort of apotheosis surrounded by luminous 
clouds, while beneath, Hungary was represented 
as coming out of chaos, and the Danube, cover- 
ed by vessels of ell nations, flowed on majesti- 
cally, not fretted by rocks or rapids, towards 
the sea." — North American Review, January, 
1850,^. 106-7-8. 



Compare, also, the following passages, which I have selected on account of their brevity : 



"The beau-ideal of this government, was it 
not the ancient diets, where 80,000 nobles as- 
sembled on horseback on the plain of Rakos, to 
deliberate upon peace or war, uttering alto- 
gether the formidable cry, 4 To Arms !' after 
which no scrutiny of the vote was needed r" — 
Revue, Tome 24,/?. 675. 



" The custom, indeed, has a historical mean- 
ing ; it throws abroad light on the ancient 
constitution of the diet, .which consisted of 
80,000 mounted ncbles, assembled on the plain 
of Rakos to determine on war or peace, and 
uttering r 11 together the formidable cry, * To 
Arms !' — after which no scrutiny of the vote 
was needed." — N. A. Review, p. 105. 



" The Hungarian constitution seems to have 
been made entirely for the profit of this class, 
or rather this class is the constitution itself. 
r J he Hungarian noble is, and calls himself a 
member of the crown of Hungary ; membrum 
sacroc coronce; he is part of the sovereignty. * * * 
If we wish for a parallel we must recall the 
government of Ancient Poland, and the defini- 
tion of J. J. Rousseau : ' There the nobles are 
everything, the burghers nothing, and the 
peasants less than nothing.' " — Revue, T. 24, p. 
676. 1* 



" The ancient constitution of Hungary was 
made, as we have seen, solely for the benefit of 
this class ; in their favor, for the protection 
of their order, the Golden Hull of Andreas II. 
had been issued. Hitherto every one of their 
number had called himself a member of the 
crown of Hungary ; he was a p irt of the sov- 
ereignty. Their idea of the constitution corres- 
ponded perfectly to Rousseau's definition of the 
government of Poland, * where the nobles are 
everything, the burghers nothing, and the peas- 
ants less than nothing.' " — N. A. Review, p. 109. 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



From the last instance, it will be seen that Mr. 
Bo-wen is indebted to De Langsdorff for even 
his quotation from Rousseau ! 

I am sorry to say that these are not isolated 
cases. Mr. Bowen's " War of Races " is nearly 
sixty pages long. Four or five of these pages 
consist of acknowledged quotations, but the 
remainder is put forth as entirely of Mr. Bow- 
en's own composition — as the result of his own 
"great labor and research." It has been so 
accepted by the readers of the North A merican 
Review, and Mr. Bo wen has received consid- 
erable credit for it, having, it is said, been ap- 
pointed to the Professorship of History in Har- 
vard University on account of the historical 
merit of that article. Nevertheless, I affirm 
that, of the sixty pages of that article, at least 
fifty are taken directly from the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, either by literal translation, or by a 
process of abridgment which any person who 
understands French, and can write tolerable 
English, could perform nearly as well as Mr. 
Bowen has performed it. And no acknowledg- 
ment whatever has been made for this, though, 
indeed, no amount of acknowledgment would 
be sufficient to justify the passing off such a 
translation as an original historical essay. Mr. 
Bowen's admission, that he " depends for in- 
formation " chiefly on M. Degerando's book, 
and on the articles of Langsdorff and Desprez, 
does not meet the case at all. It is not merely 
" information " that Mr. Bowen has derived 
from the Revue ; he has taken from it his narra- 
tive, by literal translation, or by an easy abridg- 
ment ; he has taken from it nine -tenths of his 
facts ; he has taken from it his rhetoric, the very 
ornaments of his style ; in short, all that in any 
kind of composition ought to be particularly 
the writer's own. If I may so speak, he has not 
studied and digested these French essayists, 
and re -produced their substance in a form of 
his own growth, but he has torn them limb 
from limb, and with the mangled fragments 
has put together a distorted and disjointed figure, 
which he has arrayed in the garments and 
jewels of his victims. 

I say distorted and disjointed, for Mr. Bowen 
has not only plundered Messrs. De Langsdorff 
and Desprez, but he has perverted them in the 
most outrageous manner. They are royalists 
and apologists for Austria and for Metternich ; 
but, though ill-informed and prejudiced, they 
are not destitute of honor and a sense of justice 
-^they did not begin to write with the intention 
of deliberately slandering a whole nation. They 
admit a great deal in favor of the Hungarians. 



They allow much credit to the nobility for ef- 
fecting reforms and yielding up their privileges ; 
and though they describe with severity the con- 
dition of Hungary in former times, they mention, 
without reluctance, the immense improvements 
of the last few years. But Mr. Bowen, in trans- 
lating from them, systematically omits all that 
they say in favor of the Hungarians, and converts 
all their unfavorable conjectures, " perhapses," 
and " it is possibles," into downright dogmatic 
certainties. He suppresses all that they say in 
praise of the Hungarian leaders, and exaggerates 
all that they say against them. I will give two 
instances of this perversion, out of dozens which 
I could cite. In the " War of Races," [p. 110,] 
Mr. Bowen gives a short and sneering account of 
Kossuth. The sneers, of course, are Mr. Bowen's 
own, but the rest is translated from the Revue, 
[Tome 24, p. 266,] from an article of De Langs- 
dorff, who in the very paragraph from which 
Mr. Bowen translates his "information, " says of 
Kossuth, that he is " a democrat of the new revolu- 
tionary school, who 'will seek to get rid of the nobility 
when he shall have got rid of Austria," and that 
he " has not feared to overthrow the whole po- 
litical and social state of his country, to realize 
dreams of universal equality, more chimerical in 
Hungary than any where else." Mr. Bowen 
quits De Langsdorff when he comes to this pas- 
sage, skips it, and goes on translating from the 
rest of the paragraph, leaving the gap to be filled 
up by the following rare specimen of his own 
original composition : 

"In fact, Kossuth's party, ever since it was 
organized, has been endeavoring to effect a com- 
plete separation of Hungary from Austria, the 
preservation of feudal privileges, and the dominion 
of the Magyar race, being more important in their 
eyes than the promotion of the commercial and 
other material interests of the country, and the 
intellectual cultivation of its people !" 

Again, [" War of Races," p. 89,] a passage is 
quot cd, in which De Langsdorff says : 

"I shall never forget the impression I received 
when on the bridge which crosses the Danube at 
Pesth, I saw every peasant, every poor cultivator 
of the ground, rudely stopped and compelled to 
pay toll both for himself and for the meagre 
horses harnessed to his cart. The tolls are heavy, 
amounting to a considerable sum for these poor 
people ; while the Magyar gentlemen, mounted 
on fine horses, or seated in elegant carriages, 
passed and repassed without payment. * * 
* * This exemption, it is true, was but a 
small affair, and tyranny has other practices that 
are far more odious : but from that time I was no 
more astonished by the inequalities and anom- 
alies which I witnessed during the rest of my 
journey ; I had foreseen them all on the bridge 
at Pesth." 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



7 



With these last words Mr. Bowen concluded 
his quotation. And why? Because M. de 
Langsdorff went on to say : 

*• The feeling which I experienced, others 
shared with me. In 1836, the diet decreed that 
the nobles should be subjected to toll on the sus- 
pension bridge which was about to be construct- 
ed at Pesth. This was the first breach made in 
the privileges of the nobility ; and it toas by the 
nobility that it was made. There, where I felt 
only a sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacri- 
ficing their interest without hesitation, found the 
opportunity to repair a long injustice. Since that 
time the Hungarian nobles have walked resolutely 
in that path ; it is they who for tioenty years have 
been laboring to file the chains of their subjects ; it is 
they %oho in a solemn day, have willed to break them 
forever." — Revue des Deux Mondes, Aug. 1, 1848. 

These perversions will give some idea of the 
spirit in which Mr. Bowen wrote his article, and 
of the manner in w r hich he perverted his " au- 
thorities" into a seeming support of his charges 
against the Hungarians. And I must beg the 
reader not to suppose that^these are rare instanc- 
es, which I have carefully detached from the 
body of the article. On the contrary, such 
perversions constitute the very essence of the 
" War of Races," and pervade it throughout, to 
an extent that is scarcely to be imagined by one 
who has not gone into a careful analysis of it, 
and compared it paragraph by paragraph, and 
line by line, with the documents on which it 
professes to be based. In the Christian Exam- 
iner, Mrs. Putnam has, in her peculiarly guarded 
and temperate manner, very justly described its 
character. She says, [p. 428] : 

" We are reluctantly compelled to affirm that 
there is no portion of the article on the "War of 
Races," on which the reader can safely rely. 
We do not exaggerate, and we believe that all 
those persons who have an acquaintance with 
the history of Hungary, and who have read the 
article in the North American, will sustain us 
when we say, that there is hardly a sentence in 
this article in which an error is not either ex- 
pressed or implied ; in many portions of it, error 
is so interwoven with error, that the baffled 
critic turns from the task of refutation as from 
the entrance to an inextricable labyrinth. We 
are disposed to believe that the absence of 
any formal and labored confutation of the arti- 
cle on the " War of Races" — to which absence 
the author appeals as a proof of its invulnerabil- 
ity — may be attributed to the Herculean labor 
which the task of correcting all the errors con- 
tained in this historical essay seemed to involve, 
and the great length to which such a confutation 
must be extended, if the task were thoroughly 
executed. These errors pervade every part of 
the article, and are almost as numerous in that 
portion which relates to those periods of Hunga- 
rian history which are most familiar to the 
general reader, as in those whose investigation 
requires a certain degree of research." 



In confirmation of this opinion, I will quote 
that of another person, very competent to judge 
of such a question. Count Gurowski, a man of 
great learning and ability, who has held a high 
official position in Russia, and who is intimately 
acquainted with the affairs of Eastern Europe, 
and who, moreover, is neither a Magyar, nor a 
partizan of the Magyars, but on the contrary is 
a Slavonian, and has been a prominent leader of 
the Panslavistic movement, which is most hos- 
tile to the Magyars, said, in February, 1850, in 
a review of the " War of Races :" — 

" It is a thick and dark forest of errors in his- 
torical or rather unhistorical quotations, as well 
as in reasoning. Almost every line requires 
rectification. Almost all motives assigned to 
the actions of individuals, as well as to the mass 
of the people in Vienna, in Hungary, and in the 
Sclavonian countries, are put in a false light, 
and denote by the quoted French authorities 
perfect ignorance or perfect bad faith. As most 
of the facts are misrepresented or shown in the 
falsest possible light, so almost all the deductions 
are at least erroneous ; and it cannot be other- 
wise, as a disfigured fact very naturally produces 
the most false conclusions ; and the number 
of these is infinite, so as to render their rectifi- 
cation impossible." 

This is certainly strong language ; but it has 
peculiar weight from the fact that Count Gu- 
rowski used it in the most friendly spirit towards 
Mr. Bowen, whom, at the time, he regarded as 
the unconscious victim of the misrepresentations 
of the writers in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 

The " War of Races" was followed by a> sec- 
ond article on the same subject in the North 
American Review for April, 1850, the tone of 
which was, if possible, still more unfavorable to 
the Hungarians, while the mode in which it was 
put together was not a whit more "creditable to 
the literary honesty of Mr. Bowen. One or two 
instances of this peculiar mode Avill be sufficient. 
In attempting to throw discredit on the govern- 
ment of Kossuth, a work entitled " Louis Kos- 
suth, and the Recent History of Hungary," by 
Arthur Frey, is referred to as an authority which 
" will not be disputed by the sympathizers with 
Kossuth and his party." Mr. Bowen admits 
that he has not seen this book, but says that he 
borrows some extracts from it, from the London 
Athenaeum. The first and most important of 
these extracts then follows, [N. A. R., April, 
1850, p. 499,] introduced by " Mr. Frey says." 
Now, in reality, Mr. Frey says no such thing. 
The passage which Mr. Bowen endeavors to 
palm off as Frey's, is a portion of the editorial 
in the Athenaeum, and of no more authority than 
the statements of any other anonymous English 



8 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



newspaper writer ! See London Athenaeum, Aug. 
29, 1849, p. 855. 

Repeatedly, in this second article, Mr. Bowen 
adduces as a proof that the Hungarian movement 
was not at all republican, the fact that in the 
Manifesto which is sometimes called the Dec- 
laration of Independence, the word Republic 
does not occur. The force of this objection will 
be felt, when it is remembered that in the Amer- 
ican Declaration of Independence the same 
omission occurs, the words republic or republican 
not being mentioned or alluded to. A fact 
which Mr. Bowen, at that time Professor of His- 
tory in Harvard University, does not seem to 
have been aware of — or if he were, thought fit 
to overlook it in his zeal to find fault with the 
Hungarian Declaration. 



MRS. PUTNAM S REPLY TO MR. BOWEN. 

These articles of Mr. Bowen were severely 
and ably criticised by various Journals of Boston 
and New York. But the first elaborate reply to 
them was made in the Christian Examiner, for 
Nov., 185-t), [continued March, 1851,] by Mary 
Lowell Putnam, of Roxbury, Massachusetts. 
Mrs. Putnam is a daughter of the Rev. Dr. 
Lowell, and a sister to the poet, James Russell 
Lowell. Her extraordinary attainments in lan- 
guages and general literature had long command- 
ed the respect and admiration of a wide circle 
of friends and acquaintances, though from her 
modest indifference to notoriety, her reputation 
had hitherto scarcely reached the public ear. — 
Of the extent of these attainments some idea 
may be formed from the fact that Mrs. Putnam 
has made herself acquainted, and in most cases 
well acquainted, with Greek, Latin and Hebrew, 
with French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Ger- 
man, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Polish and 
Russian, with Turkish and Sanscrit, and, I be- 
lieve, with several other European and Asiatic 
languages, which I am not able to designate with 
accuracy. And creditable as is the acquisition 
of this mass of knowledge, the circumstances 
under which it has been effected render it still 
more meritorious ; for besides the impediments 
to literary labor of a large household and a fam- 
ily of children, all the duties incident to which 
have been performed with exemplary fidelity, 
Mrs. Putnam has labored under the disadvantage 
of weak eyesight, so that for years she did not 
open a book, but was forced, in the study of sev- 
eral languages, to rely wholly on the aid of read- 



ers and amanuenses, who in some cases did not 
understand a word of what they were assisting 
her to acquire. The obstacles of this kind which 
her energy and perseverance have surmounted, 
were indeed full as great as those with which 
the historians, Augustin Thierry and Prescott, 
have had to contend, and her triumph over them 
deserves the same applause that has been so 
justly bestowed on theirs. 

Mrs. Putnam's knowledge of the languages I 
have enumerated is not limited to the grammar 
and dictionary. She has made herself familiar, 
in many cases, with the literature and history of 
the nations by whom they are spoken ; and of 
the result of her researches she has given some 
specimens, in a series of contributions to the 
North American Review and the Christian Ex- 
aminer, written with a vigor of style and thought 
as creditable to her intellect, as the matters they 
treat of are to her learning and industry. To 
the literature and history of Hungary and Po- 
land she has of late years given special attention, 
and her studies in this direction have been facil- 
itated by an acquaintance with eminent schol- 
ars of those countries resident among us, and by 
the possession of a very fine collection of books 
in nearly all the languages of Europe. 

"With these qualifications for the task, Mrs. 
Putnam accepted the challenge which Mr Bowen, 
in the North American Review, had offered to 
the public on the subject of his articles on Hun- 
gary. She replied to him in the most thor- 
ough manner, in the Christian Examiner, and 
demonstrated to the satisfaction of everybody 
who has read her reply, that he had pretended 
to knowledge on the subject which he did not 
possess, and that he had greatly misrepresented 
the Hungarians and their cause. By a skilful 
analysis of his first article, she proved that it 
was based altogether on the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, and that even that Revue, hostile as it 
is to the Hungarians and to Freedom, afforded 
no true ground for the monstrous accusations 
and misrepresentations of the " War of Races." 
She showed that the respectable and reliable 
authority, Degerando, the title of whose work 
he had placed at the head of his article, was not 
used at all in its preparation, so that really 
" there is not a statement of fact or opinion in 
the article which can be attributed to M. Deger- 
ando ; and the greater part of it is in direct 
contradiction to the statements of that author." 
She showed also, that Mr. Bo wen's articles con- 
tained contradictory statements on points mate- 
rially affecting his argument, and that he had 
himself mentioned facts, the admission of which 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



completely overthrew the conclusions he was 
laboring to establish. She pointed out the 
cause of these inconsistencies, so singular in an 
article drawn entirely from one shallow source, 
which cause was, that Mr. Bowen's zeal against 
the Hungarians had outrun even that of the 
French writers from whose partisan essays he 
drew his materials, so that his anti-Hungarian 
theories were much more extreme than theirs, 
and were so far from being supported, that they 
were actually contradicted by some of the facts 
which they had furnished and he had quoted. 
She proved, in fine, in the most conclusive man- 
ner, that Mr. Bowen's articles were inaccurate, 
illogical and unjust, to such a degree that it 
might literally be said of them, " that there is 
hardly a sentence in which an error is not either 
expressed or implied." 

This was proved, too, not by Magyar testimo- 
ny, as Mr. Bowen sneeringly asserted in a sub- 
sequent rejoinder,but by the authorities to which 
he had himself referred, and whom he had 
expressly endorsed as respectable and trustwor- 
thy. It may be remarked also, that this over- 
whelming refutation of Mr. Bowen's mistakes 
and fallacies was performed without one word 
of personality or harshness, with a rigid attention 
to all the punctilios of decorous controversy, 
and in a style which for moderation, dignity and 
power, formed a striking contrast to that of the 
articles on which she was commenting. Her 
reply was not less remarkable for power of rea- 
soning and strictness of logic, than for profound 
and varied learning. 



MR. BOWEN S REJOINDER. 

Mr. Bowen attempted to reply to Mrs. Putnam, 
and to some of his newspaper critics, by two Let- 
ters in the Boston Daily Advertiser. The first 
of these letters consists chiefly of a sketch of 
himself and his position, intermixed with de- 
nunciation of those who have criticised him in 
the public journals. It exhibits a sensitiveness 
to criticism not to have been looked for in the 
editor of a critical review, whose profession for 
years has been to expose and castigate the liter- 
ary misdemeanors of others, and who has not 
been remarkable for the forbearance or good 
nature with which he has exercised that pro- 
fession. 

A few specimens will suffice to show the style 
and temper of this first letter. The Boston 



Transcript and the New York Tribune are spoken 
of as not respectable papers ; and Mr. George 
Ripley, of the Tribune, is described as " a former 
Clergyman of Boston, who long ago abandoned his 
profession and his faith, to xoander in the wilds of 
infidel socialism.'" Mr. Bowen says of himself, 
that against him " a grand crusade of the Coal- 
ized Democratic and Freesoil parties has been 
invoked, that they might obtain possession of the 
government of the State, for the express purpose of 
depriving him of an honorable appointment, exclu- 
sively literary and educational in its character, 
ichich he held, and thereby of despoiling him and his 
family of their daily bread " — a statement which 
affords an entirely original if not very satisfactory 
solution of the political revolution in Massachu- 
setts, and affords also a tolerably fair notion of 
Mr. Bowen's peculiar mode of viewing contem- 
porary history. 

His second Letter is devoted exclusively to 
Mrs. Putnam's article in the Christian Examiner. 
He says that he has read that article '* with as- 
tonishment and profound regret. It is not merely 
written in a sneering and offensive tone through- 
out, but its apparent object is not so much to 
defend the Hungarians, as to damage the char- 
acter of the Reviewer, by insinuating, and even 
openly declaring, that his object was to under- 
take the defence of Austria." Mr. Bowen makes 
no attempt to substantiate by quotations this 
unjust description of the tone and object of Mrs. 
Putnam's article, but proceeds, by way of retort, 
to assert that she " admits more for Austria — 
claims more for Austria than I have ever admit- 
ted or claimed." He says that she " even praises 
the Austrian policy," and has a better right 
than he to be called " an apologist for Austria.' 
To prove this he quotes two expressions from 
Mrs. Putnam's article, pages 448-49, which may 
reasonably be presumed to be the strongest he 
could find. They are these : " The Austrian 
Government is not more than any other, entirely 
independent of Public opinion." "Among the 
reforms proposed by the liberal party in Hungary^ 
there were doubtless some tohich were viewed with 
less disfavor than others by the Austrian govern* 
ment, and which, under certain conditions, it might 
not be indisposed to promote." 

Mr. Bowen must have held in slight estima- 
tion the intelligence of his readers in the Daily 
Advertiser, or must have relied strongly upon 
the haste with which newspaper articles are com- 
monly read, when he ventured to quote the above 
sentences, ps involving " praises of Austrian 
policy," and proving that their writer is even 
more than himself an " apologist for Austria.' 



10 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



He must have known that it might with truth 
be said of the goverment of Rome, under Nero 
or Caligula, or of the governments of Dahomey 
or Morocco, under their worst tyrants, that 
" they were not, any more than any other, en- 
tirely independent of public opinion." No gov- 
ernment has yet existed among men entirely 
independent of public opinion. As for the sec- 
ond sentence, it is difficult to discover in it any 
** praises of Austrian policy," especially when 
the force of the qualifying phrase, " under cer- 
tain conditions," is considered. There is prob- 
ably no government so corrupt, or so adverse to 
improvement, that it might not be disposed to 
promote some reforms under certain conditions, 
particularly if those conditions were manifestly 
to its own advantage. 

It is clear, then, that Mr. Bowen's charge 
agaimst Mrs. Putnam, that she praises the Aus- 
trian policy, and is an apologist for Austria, is 
not at all justified by the quotations which he 
brings to support it. This would have been 
still more evident, had not Mr, Bowen, with 
his usual unfairness, omitted to give the whole of 
the passages from which he made his quotations. 
In the first instance which he cites, Mrs. Put- 
nam, so far from defending the Austrian gov- 
ernment, was actually exposing the fallacious 
nature of Mr. Bowen's defence of it. He had 
said, in the North American Review for Janu- 
ary, 1850, page 108 : — "It is much to the credit 
of the Austrian government, that although 
Szechenyi was the leader of the constitutional 
opposition in the diet, it adopted nearly all his 
projects of reform, and submitted them under 
the form of royal propositions to be discussed 
in both houses." Upon this Mrs. Putnam re- 
marked : — " The Reviewer founds his opinion 
of the disposition of the Austrian government 
in regard to refortr, upon the nature of the 
royal propositions offered to the diet. This ar- 
gument is wholly fallacious. The Austrian gov- 
ernment is not more than any other, entirely inde- 
pendent of 'public opinion ; and in Hungary espe- 
cially, it has always been forced, in appearance 
at least, to pay a certain regard to the wishes of 
the nation. By affecting to take the initiative 
in reform, by offering to the consideration of 
the diet some of the questions which occupied 
the attention of the nation, the Austrian govern- 
ernment effected a double purpose ; it allayed 
the excitement of the nation by apparent con- 
cession, and secured for itself, with the ignorant 
and short-sighted, the credit of proposing meas- 
ures whose success it was at the same time re- 
tarding and thwarting by every expedient." 



In the second instance, Mrs. Putnam's lan- 
guage was this : — " Among the reforms proposed 
by the liberal party in Hungary, there were doubt- 
less some which were viewed iciih less disfavor than 
others by the Austrian government, and which, un- 
der certain conditions, it might not be indisposed to 
promote. But under these conditions, they 
would be less serviceable than dangerous to 
Hungary. Thus, the contest in the diet often 
concerned, not simply the adoption of the meas- 
ure proposed, but the conditions under which it 
should become law. For example, with regard 
to the taxation of the nobles, Austria could 
have no objection to their taxing themselves at 
their pleasure, if the Austrian government was 
to have the command of the revenues thus 
raised ; but the Hungarian nobles, while they 
were ready to contribute money for the service 
of their country, refused to do so to strengthen 
the hands of its enemies. They insisted that if 
the nation subjected itself to taxation, the diet 
of the nation should have a voice in the disposi- 
tion of the funds thus contributed." 

It will be perceived, from this, that Mr. Bowen 
detached from their proper connection the sen- 
tences which I have italicised, and held them 
up as proofs that Mrs. Putnam had praised the 
Austrian policy and was an apologist for Austria, 
when it was perfectly obvious that the whole 
tenor of her argument was just the other way. 
What renders this attempt to misrepresent Mrs. 
Putnam still more inexcusable is, that Mr. 
Bowen, as if confident that his misquotations 
had demonstrated that Mrs. Putnam was guilty 
of gross injustice towards him, assumes a tone 
of injured innocence, and indignantly declares 
that " this is not a point of ordinary misrepre- 
sentation, or of wresting words from their 
proper meaning ; it is a question of simple truth or 
falsehood." Mr. Bowen is right. It is evidently 
a question of simple truth or falsehood, and it 
is equally evident that the falsehood does not 
rest with Mrs. Putnam. 

Mr. Bowen goes on to say, " Of course, I im- 
mediately formed the opinion, which was only 
strengthened by perusal of the remainder of the 
article, that it was not written by the person 
whose initials it bears, and who was unwarily 
lent the sanction of a highly respectable name 
to statements and language furnished by 
another." This gives us some insight into the 
process by which Mr. Bowen " forms his opin- 
ions." He had not the slightest reason for sup- 
posing that Mrs. Putnam did not write the ar- 
ticle. He knew that she had furnished to his 
own Review several articles of equal learning 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY, 



II 



and ability ; and he knew, moreover, that she 
was incapable of accepting the credit of an ar- 
ticle which she did not write. He should have 
known, also, that in proceeding upon this in- 
jurious assumption, he was rendering himself 
liable to the imputation of being ready to insult 
Mrs. Putnam, without being ready to incur the 
responsibility of doing it in a direct manner. 

Mr. Bo wen next says: "The hardihood or 
recklessness of assertion which I have exposed 
in this instance, pervades the whole article. I 
should say that it had been prepared by on© 
who had a profound knowledge of the Magyar 
language, and a profound ignorance of history 
and every other subject." The " instance " to 
which Mr. Bowen refers in this insolent style, 
is that of "praising the Austrian policy," in 
which, as I have already shown, the " hardihood 
or recklessness of assertion" belongs to him 
alone. 

Succeeding this, is a string of sneers at Mrs. 
Putnam's knowledge of the Magyar tongue, 
and the consequent advantage it gives her in 
writing of Hungarian history. The logic of 
this portion of his letter, and indeed Mr. Bowen's 
logic generally, may be judged of by a single 
passage. He says : " On the same principle 
we must declare that no one shall write about 
the history of America who has not a thorough 
knowledge of Choctaw." In thus comparing 
the Magyar to the Choctaw — the language of a 
great and cultivated people, with the dialect of 
a few thousand savages — Mr. Bowen must have 
known that he was making a comparison which 
was no comparison at all. A knowledge of the 
Magyar is obviously of the highest value in 
writing of the recent history of Hungary ; a 
knowledge of Choctaw is not needed for the 
history of America. The passage will serve to 
illustrate both Mr. Bowen's mode of reasoning, 
and the candor with which he has treated Mrs. 
Putnam. 

It is not difficult to point out the cause of the 
bitter aversion which Mr. Bowen entertains to- 
wards the Magyar language, and the indigna- 
tion which he has repeatedly expressed in the 
North American Preview, as well as in the Daily 
Advertiser, at Mrs. Putnam's presumption in 
making herself acquainted with it. In his first 
article, the " War of Races," he laid great stress 
on a passage in the Hungarian Declaration of 
Independence, in which something was said 
about " the ancient and received principles 
which have been recognized for ages," which 
according to Mr. Bowen's interpretation, meant 
" acknowledging the absolute supremacy of the 



Magyar race in the country which they con- 
quered, and where they have been lords of the 
soil and the dominant nation for eight or nine 
centuries." — [North American Review, vol. lxx, 
p. 82.] Mr. Bowen made a great point of this, 
which in fact was the only piece of evidence to 
be found in his article — his quotations from 
French Magazines being, of course, no evi- 
dence at all. Mrs. Putnam quietly disposed 
of the whole thing, by showing that there was 
no such passage in the Declaration, but that it 
was an interpolation of the person who trans- 
lated the document from the Magyar into Eng- 
lish, who had taken the word fonebbi {above) 
to mean former or ancient, and had paraphrased 
it accordingly. The demolition of the structure 
he had reared on this passage, has given Mr, 
Bowen a strong disrelish for the Magyar lan- 
guage in general, and especially for the word 
fonebbi, to which he has never since alluded 
without evident disgust and vexation. 



MR. BOWEN S EIGHT POINTS. 

The main portion of Mr. Bowen's Letter is 
devoted to the consideration of eight points in 
the former history of Hungary, concerning 
which, as Mrs. Putnam proved, he had shown 
himself to be incorrectly informed ; which points 
he himself characterizes as among the 1 " com- 
mon and notorious facts of history." Her ob- 
ject in exposing his ignorance in these particu- 
lars, was to show, that as he was grossly mis- 
taken about well known and long settled points 
of Hungarian history, he was not likely to be 
accurate with regard to comparatively obscure 
and confused passages. That portion of the 
letter in the Daily Advertiser which contained 
the discussion of these Eight Points, appeared 
subsequently in the North American Review 
for January, 1851, pp. 241-2-3-4-5. 

The first of these points Mr. Bowen states 
and defends as follows : 

" The Examiner sneers at me for representing 
Ferdinand I. as claiming to be rightful sov- 
ereign of Hungary, in quality apparently of de- 
scendant from his wife, after I had admitted 
that the Hungarian crown at this period was 
elective. Dr. Robertson says that he did claim 
the crown, and that \ this claim was founded on 
a double title ; the one derived from the ancient 
pretensions of the house of Austria to both 
kingdoms ; the other from the right of his wife, 
the only sister of the deceased monarch ;' and in 
the very next sentence he admits that the 



12 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



crown was elective. Archdeacon Coxe asserts 
the same fact, in almost exactly the same lan- 
guage. The Examiner's sneer, therefore, is di- 
rected against these two historians." 

This is all that Mr. Bo wen says on the sub- 
ject, and leaves the uninformed reader to sup- 
pose that the matter is settled by the reference 
to Coxe and Robertson, and that Mrs. Putnam 
stands opposed to two respectable historians. 
Now let us see what the passage was on which 
Mrs. Putnam was commenting. It may be 
found on page 97 of the North American Re- 
view for January, 1850. Speaking of the Hun- 
garians, it says, " Ferdinand I. of Austria, had 
become their rightful sovereign after the death 
of the unhappy Louis II., whose sister he had 
married, and tohose right was of course transmitted 
to her descendants." The apparent meaning of 
this is, as Mrs. Putnam justly remarked, that 
Ferdinand became rightful King of Hungary, in 
quality of descendant from his wife ; which in- 
volved not only an absurdity in expression, but 
in point of fact, for he became King by election, 
and not by right of his wife, who had no right 
at all to the throne, for, as Mr. Bowen had him- 
self expressly stated on the same page, the female 
line had at that time no claim whatever to the 
Hungarian crown, nor indeed for nearly two 
hundred years afterwards. Mr. Bowen, how- 
ever, quotes Dr. Robertson, and refers to Arch- 
deacon Coxe, to prove that Ferdinand did claim 
the crown. Mrs. Putnam did not deny his 
claim, but denied Mr. Bowen's assertion that on 
the strength of that claim he became rightful 
King of Hungary. The truth of the matter, 
and the nature of Mr. Bowen's mode of making 
quotations and references, will be understood 
by the following passages from his own author- 
ities. The first is from Robertson's Charles V., 
Harper's edition, page 219 : 

" As Lewis was the last male of the royal 
family of Jagellon, the Archduke Ferdinand 
claimed both his crowns. This claim was found- 
ed on a double title ; the one derived from the 
ancient pretensions of the house of Austria to 
both kingdoms ; the other from the right of his 
wife, the sister of the deceased monarch. The 
feudal institutions, however, subsisted both in 
Hungary and Bohemia in such vigor, and the 
nobles possessed such extensive power, that the 
crowns were still elective, and Ferdinand's rights, 
if they had not been powerfully supported, would 
have met with little regard" 

Various considerations, none of which had 
reference to the claim of his wife, " at length 
secured Ferdinand the throne." Dr. Robertson 
says, " though a considerable party voted for 
the vayvode of Transylvania." It is evident 



from this passage, of which Mr. Bowen quoted 
only a portion, that Robertson, so far from sus- 
taining the statement in the North American 
Review, really controverts it. 

The case may be briefly stated thus. Mr. 
Bowen asserted that Ferdinand I. became right- 
ful King of Hungary in right of his wife, who 
was sister to King Louis II. Mrs. Putnam re- 
marked that Mr. Bowen had himself admitted 
that the Hungarian crown at that period was 
elective, and consequently Ferdinand could not 
have become rightful King by right of his wife, 
who, of course, had no hereditary right to an 
elective crown, and who, besides, was excluded 
by a law which rendered females ineligible to 
the sovereignty of Hungary. Mr. Bowen re- 
plies, that Robertson and Coxe siipport his as- 
sertion, and by a garbled extract from Robert- 
son shows that, according to that historian, 
Ferdinand claimed the crown in right of his 
wife — as if claiming the crown were the same 
thing as receiving it, or being rightfully entitled 
to it. In the very passage which Mr. Bowen 
partially and unfairly quotes, Robertson ex- 
pressly states that the crown was elective, and 
that Ferdinand was chosen king for other con- 
siderations than his marriage with the sister of 
Louis. 

But Mr. Bowen refers to Archbishop Coxe, 
the historian of the House of Austria, in proof 
that his assertion was correct. Here is the 
passage to which he refers :— Hist, of House of 
Austria, Bonn's ed., vol. i., p. 496. 

"Louis being the last male of his family, 
Ferdinand claimed both crowns under a double 
title ; the one derived from family compacts, 
which secured the reversion to the House of 
Austria in failure of male issue to the reigning 
family ; and the other in right of his wife, 
Anne, the only sister of the deceased monarch. 
But the natives of Hungary and Bohemia were too 
much attached to their right of election to respect 
these compacts, or even to acknowledge his claims as 
husband of the princess ; and Ferdinand prudently 
xcaiving his pretensions, offered himself as a candi- 
date) according to the usual mode of election." 

Here we have it distinctly stated that the na- 
tives of Hungary not only refused to acknowl- 
edge the Austrian's claims in right of his wife, 
but that Ferdinand waived his pretensions, and 
" offered himself as a candidate, according to 
the usual mode of election." Mr. Bowen ven- 
tured to quote a detached portion of Robert- 
son's statement of this matter, but he prudently 
contents himself with referring to Coxe, with- 
out quoting him. I will also remark here, as a 
very significant fact, that in none of these quo- 
tations or references does Mr. Bowen mention the 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



13 



page or volume, thus rendering it impossible for 
his readers to follow and verify his authorities, 
except by a laborious search through perhaps 
several voluminous works. The reason of this 
unusual omission is apparent enough to those 
who have taken the trouble to hunt up the pas- 
sages to which he appeals, or which he pretends 
to quote. 

Having shown by the very authorities to 
which he himself referred, that Mr. Bo wen was 
wrong in the first point, which he contested 
with Mrs. Putnam, let us consider the second. 
He states it thus: — [North American Review, 
p. 2f2.] 

" We had asserted that 'after the memorable 
scene with Maria Theresa, this right [of the 
House of Hapsburg to reign in Hungary] was 
extended, according to the terms of the Prag- 
matic Sanction to the female line.' The Ex- 
aminer objects, that ' if this right had not been 
extended to the female line in the lifetime of 
Charles III., father of Maria Theresa, the me- 
morable scene could never have taken place.' 
The ignorance here displayed is almost incredible. 
Charles the Third lived seven or eight centuries 
before Maria Theresa was born. Charles the 
Sixth (as he is called by all historians except 
the Magyars) who was her father, had indeed 
persuaded the Hungarians nominally to accept 
the Pragmatic Sanction, some twenty years be- 
fore the scene, just as most Sovereigns of 
Europe had done, who broke their pledge im- 
mediately after the death of Charles, just as the 
Hungarians were expected to break theirs. Of 
course the female line was actually established 
on the throne only by the success of the queen's 
appeal to the Hungarian Diet." 

In Mr. Bowen's own language it might be 
said that the disingemiousness here displayed 
is almost incredible. He pretends to believe 
that Mrs. Putnam had confounded Charles the 
Sixth of Germany who lived in the 18th cen- 
tury, with Charles the Third, who lived in the 
9th century. Now he knew very well that Mrs. 
Putnam meant Charles the Sixth of Germany, 
though she preferred, very properly, to use his 
Hungarian title in writing of Hungarian history. 
The proof that he knew this, is contained in the 
sentence which he has put between brackets — 
" Charles the Sixth, (as he is called by all histo- 
rians, except the Magyars)," which shows that 
Mr. Bowen was aware that the Magyars did not 
call him Charles the Sixth, and that Mrs. 
Putnam in styling him Charles the Third, was 
using his Hungarian title. Consequently he 
knew that his rude charge of " almost incredi- 
ble ignorance " was without foundation, and 
was a gratuitous insult to Mrs. Putnam. 

In transferring this passage from the Boston 
Daily Advertiser to the North American 
Review, Mr. Bowen added the following 

2 



note [N. A. Rev. Jan. 1851, p. 243] which 
establishes beyond question his unfairness in 
this matter : 

"The overweening national pride of the Mag- 
yars appears even ludicrous, when manifested 
through their obstinate determination not to 
recognize their sovereigns except under the ap- 
pellation by which they were known in the 
annals of Hungary, though they were univer- 
sally known by a different title throughout civ- 
ilized Europe. Grave complaints were made 
by Magyar writers, and even by the May gar 
Diet, because their late sovereign would style 
himself Ferdinand L, while they persisted in 
calling him Ferdinand V. What common 
reader would recognize the Second James of 
England under his Scotch title of James VII r" 

I have copied the whole note. It will be 
seen that Mr. Bowen distinctly avows his 
knowledge that the Hungarian sovereigns were 
known by a different title in the annals of 
Hungary from that which they bore in the an- 
nals of Germany, and therefore, though he 
may think what he pleases of the propriety of 
using the Hungarian title, he is fully aware 
that its use does not display " almost incredi- 
ble ignorance" and consequently his charge of 
such ignorance against Mrs. Putnam, and his 
pretended belief that she confounded Charles 
III. of Hungary with Charles III. of Germany, 
can only be characterized as a spiteful and un- 
truthful fling at that lady. 

Mr. Bowen's intense hatred of the Hunga- 
rians, and his " obstinate determination " to 
misrepresent them, is strikingly manifested by 
his ascribing to " overweening national pride, 
which appears even ludicrous," their persist- 
ence in calling their sovereigns by a national 
title, instead of a foreign one. It may be that 
Mr. Bowen does not know, but certainly every 
man who has read history to any considerable 
extent, knows that all nations situated as the 
Hungarians have been, have acted like them in 
this respect. They would have been false to 
themselves if they had not. Charles I. of Spain 
became, by election, Charles V. of Germany, and 
by the latter title he was, and still is universally 
known throughout civilized Europe. Yet the 
Spanish nation persisted and persist in styling 
him Charles I., when speaking of their own his- 
tory. And in Scotland, previous to the legisla- 
tive union with England, the Scottish nation 
continued to speak of their sovereigns by the 
national, instead of the English title. In the 
Scottish Parliament and in all public documents 
James I. and James II. of England were always 
mentioned as James VI. and James VII. It was 
a mark of independence and nationality, which 
was guarded with just anxiety. Mr. Bowen's 



14 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



inquiry, " what common reader would recog- 
nize the second James of England under his 
Scotch title of James VII. ? " is worded with 
that ambiguity upon which he frequently relies 
to cover up his fallacies. He does not state 
under what circumstances or conditions he sup- 
poses James to be mentioned. If he were to 
write on a blank sheet of paper the words 
"James the Second," or " James the Seventh," 
certainly, no reader, common or uncommon, 
could tell who was meant. But if in writing 
the history of Scotland, James VII. were men- 
tioned, it would be a very uncommon reader 
who did not recognize James II. of England ; 
while if the monarch in question were mention- 
ed simply as James II., the second James of 
Scotland, who lived two hundred years before 
him, would be understood. 

Mr. Bowen's reference to the Hungarian Diet 
and to Ferdinand I. or V., is founded altogether 
upon a passage in Paget's Hungary and Tran- 
sylvania, a work which Mr. Bowen justly char- 
acterizes as " excellent and impartial," and 
from which he quotes largely in the course of 
his articles. I copy the passage, because it con- 
tains a clear statement of the case, and because 
it will serve to illustrate Mr, Bowen's mode of 
dealing with the " authorities " to whom he so 
confidently refers : 

" The bill now brought up from the Deputies, 
and to which the degree of importance attached 
by all parties, appeared ridiculous to a stranger, 
had reference to the appellation of the new 
king, and was to settle whether he should be 
addressed as Ferdinand the First or Ferdinand 
the Fifth. The matter, hoivever, teas not so unim- 
portant as it may appear ; the fact is, he is Em- 
peror Ferdinand the First of Austria, and King 
Ferdinand the Fifth of Ilicngury ; and unless 
Hungary had ceased to be an independent country, 
which the greatest courtier would not dare to insin- 
uate, there could be no question as to his proper 
title. The Magnates, however, thought other- 
wise ; it was understood that the Court desired 
that the style of Ferdinand the First should be 
used, and the Magnates were too anxious to 
please, not to desire the same thing. The Dep- 
uties had now, for the fourth time, sent up this 
same bill, insisting on the title of Ferdinand 
the Fifth ; and for the fourth time the Magnates 
were now about to reject it. Two or three short 
speeches were made in Latin, the Palatine 
seemed to sum up the evidence in the same 
language, and the question was declared decid- 
ed. As we afterwards heard, it was in vain the 
Court party exhausted their breath and servility 
in favor of what they supposed the Court would 
wish. At the moment when the Magnates were 
as firm as rocks on the wrong side, the Court 
took the wise course of showing its contempt 
for such supporters by sending down a procla- 
mation — ' We, Ferdinand the Fifth, by the 



grace of God, King of Hungary,' &c. — adopting 
of its own accord what it knew to be right, and 
perceived to be the general wish, leaving the 
odium of having opposed it to its blind satel- 
lites.— [Paget, ch. vi. vol. 1, pp. 175, 6, 7, Am. 
edition.'] 

From this passage Mr. Bowen has manufac- 
tured his sneering remark, that — " Grave com- 
plaints were made by Magyar writers, and even 
by the Magyar Diet, because their late sovereign 
would style himself Ferdinand I., while they 
persisted in calling him Ferdinand V." 

In support of his assertion, that " after the 
memorable scene with Maria Theresa, the 
right of the House of Hapsburg to reign in 
Hungary was extended, according to the terms 
of the Pragmatic sanction, to the female line" — 
Mr. Bowen says : — [North American Revieto, p. 
243.] 

" Archdeacon Coxe, who is followed by Pro- 
fessor Smyth, when speaking of the preparation 
for the scene in 1741, says ' the grey-headed 
politicians of the Court of Vienna in vain urged 
that the Hungarians, who, when Charles the 
Sixth proposed the Pragmatic Sanction, had de- 
clared that they icere accustomed to be governed by 
men, and would not consent to a female succession, 
would seize this opportunity of withdrawing 
from the Austrian domination. But Maria 
Theresa formed a different judgment and her 
opinion was justified by the event.'" 

Mr. BoAven prudently omits to indicate in 
what part of Coxe's extensive work this passage 
is to be found. It occurs on page 269 of vol. 3 
of Bonn's edition, not far from the middle of 
chapter 101. It really has nothing whatever to 
do with the question. The fact is, according to 
Coxe himself, that Maria Theresa made no ap- 
peal whatever to the Hungarian Diet on the 
subject of her right to the throne. Her right 
to the throne had been solemnly recognized by 
the Hungarian Diet, nearly twenty years before. 
The Hungarian nation acquiesced in that re- 
cognition ; it made no opposition to her acces- 
sion, but on the contrary, as Coxe expressly 
says, vol. 3, p. 268, she, " at her coronation, 
had received from her grateful subjects the 
warmest demonstrations of loyalty and affec- 
tion." And yet Mr. Bowen quotes from the 
very next page of Coxe, to prove that " of course 
the female line was actually established on the 
throne only by the success of the queen's appeal 
to the feelings of the Hungarian Diet I " He 
might as well have said that Mr. Fillmore was 
actually established in the Presidency only by 
the good reception of his first message to Con- 
gress. Maria Theresa's appeal was for military 
aid — for men and money. She had been treach- 
erously attacked by nearly all the neighboring 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



15 



nations, including, among others, France, Prus- 
sia, Bavaria, and Saxony : her dominions were 
invaded on all sides by powerful armies, and in 
this " wholly desperate " condition, as Coxe 
says, "Vienna menaced with an instant siege, 
abandoned by all her allies, without treasure, 
without an efficient army, without able minis- 
ters," she threw herself on the generosity of 
the Hungarian Diet, not for confirmation of her 
right to the throne, for that they had already 
confirmed, but for means to carry on the war. 
The Hungarians nobly responded. They voted 
large supplies of men and money ; they rose in 
arms with enthusiasm, thirty thousand volun- 
teers marched to the relief of Vienna, and Aus- 
tria was rescued from imminent destruction. 
The passage from Coxe which Mr. Bowen quot- 
ed so confidently, was a rhetorical flourish 
about the doubts which "the grey-headed pol- 
iticians of the Court of Vienna " had entertained 
as to the success of her appeal — and nothing 
more. Professor Smyth, as Mr. Bowen ac- 
knowledges, follows Archdeacon Coxe in his 
account of the matter ; and that account is in 
both of them, wholly against the statement 
which Mr. Bowen refers to them as sustaining, 
and fully justifies Mrs. Putnam's criticism of 
that statement. 

The third point which Mr. Bowen contests 
with Mrs. Putnam, he states in this manner : — 
[North American Iievieio,p 243.] 

"The Examiner, in referring to a statement 
of ours, says that ' the confirmation of the union 
with Austria, or to speak more accurately, the 
confirmation of the House of Hapsburg, on the 
Hungarian throne, by the act of the Diet of 
1G87,' could not have contributed to the release 
of Hungary from the Turks in 1683. Of course 
it could not ; but according to Coxe and all 
other historians (except the Magyars) the union 
with Austria was in fact confirmed as early as 
1567." 

Mr. Bowen does not here, as in other parts 
of his rejoinder, quote the passage from the 
North American on which Mrs. Putnam was 
commenting, but merely alludes to it as "a 
statement of mine." I do not know why in this 
instance he departed from his usual practice, 
but I know that if he had quoted his own 
words, it would have been evident to his read- 
ers that Mrs. Putnam's criticism was perfectly 
just. He said — North American Review, Jan., 
1850, page 97 — that "Hungary made choice, so 
long as her monarchy remained elective, of the 
Emperor of Austria to be her king, and finally, 
in a Diet held at Presburg, in 1687, acknowl- 
edged the hereditary right of the same family 



to reign in both countries." This acknowledg- 
ment was, of course, the confirmation of the 
House of Hapsburg on the Hungarian throne. 
Yet Mr. Bowen, after thus fixing the date of 
the "union with Austria" in 1687, in the North 
American Review for Jan., 1850, says in his 
letter to the Daily Advertiser and in the North 
American for January, 1851, "according to 
Coxe and all other historians, it was confirmed, 
as early as 1567." To support his new theory, 
Mr. Bowen quotes three or four lines from 
Coxe — vol. 2, p. 49 — about John Sigismond, 
stating that Sigismond " engaged not to as- 
sume the title of King of Hungary, except in 
his correspondence with the Turks, and to ac- 
knowledge the Emperor as king, his superior 
and master," — which has nothing whatever to 
do with the matter. Coxe really confirms Mr. 
Bowen' s first statement, the one in the North 
American, Jan. 1850, as may be seen by reference 
to vol. 2, pages 450, 1, 2, chap. 66, in which, 
after narrating the victories over the Turks in 
1687, he says: 

" In the midst of these successes, Leopold 
completed his long meditated design of render- 
ing the crown hereditary. * * * * Notwith- 
standing the wretched state of Hungary, and the 
humiliation of every foreign power from whom 
the natives could expect assistance, they adhered 
with singular pertinacity to the mischievous, 
though darling privilege of electing their 
monarch ; they employed every subterfuge, and 
offered every expedient, to save a right which 
they considered as the palladium of their liber- 
ties. "When all the threats, bribes, or conces- 
sions of Leopold could not extort their consent 
to render the succession hereditary in the female 
line, he prudently yielded to their prejudices. 
The states agreed to the coronation of Joseph 
as an hereditary sovereign, and confirmed the suc- 
cession in the males, both of the German and 
Spanish branches ; but still reserved to the 
nation the right of election on the extinction of 
the male line." 

This was in 1637, when, and not in 1567, the 
House of Hapsburg was admitted to hereditary 
possession of the Hungarian throne. It follows 
therefore, from Mr. Bowen's own authority, 
and from that of Archdeacon Coxe to whom he 
refers, that he was wrong, and Mrs. Putnam 
right in the third point. 

Mr. Bowen states the fourth point thus : — 
(N. A. II., p. 244.) 

" The Examiner goes on to affirm that 'the 
Turks were not driven out of Hungary in 1683 ; 
neither toere they driven out by Sobieski, though 
the reviewer seems so well satisfied of this fact.' 
We had tolerably good reasons to be satisfied of 
it, if Coxe, and every other English, French, 
and German historian, who have written the 
history of this period, arc to be trusted." 



16 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



I do not understand what could have induced 
Mr. Bo wen so confidently to assert that his state- 
ment is supported by all German historians, 
when he had before him, on the very page of the 
Christian Examiner from which he was quot- 
ing, Mrs. Putnam's reference to three German 
histories, in proof that his statement was in- 
correct. Nor do I understand how, if he ex- 
amined all the German historians of that period, 
as his remark would imply, he could have over- 
looked that passage in so accessible a work as 
Mcnzel's History of Germany — vol. 2, p. 495, 
of the English translation — in which it is 
stated, that after Sobieski had "returned to 
Poland — Charles of Lorraine, aided by Lewis 
of Baden, carried on the war during the ensu- 
ing year, and attempted to regain Hungary." Of 
course, if Hungary had been already regained 
by Sobieski, Charles of Lorraine would not 
have attempted to regain it. Menzel, in the 
very next sentence, e«pressly says, " the 
Turkish commandants and garrisons retained 
possession of the Hungarian fortresses, and 
offered a brave and obstinate resistance." It is 
evident, then, that all the German historians do 
not support Mr. Bo wen's assertion, that Sobieski 
expelled the Turks from Hungary. Neither 
do all the English historians, as I shall now 
proceed to show from that very work of Arch- 
deacon Coxe, to which Mr. Bo wen so frequent- 
ly refers. It is true that Mr. Bowen quotes a 
passage from Coxe, which, to a careless reader, 
might seem to prove the contrary, though no 
person who had read the book, or had it before 
him, could possibly be misled by it. This 
passage states that, after Sobieski had defeated 
the Turks at Vienna and at Parkan " the Turk- 
ish army, continuing their flight to Belgrade, aban- 
doned Hungary." — Hist. House of Aus., vol. 2, 
p. 449. This refers merely to that particular 
Turkish army which Sobieski had routed, and 
which he pursued only to Gran, the nearest 
Turkish fortress in Hungary, in the capture of 
which he participated with Charles of Lorraine, 
the German commander. The reason why the 
Turkish army retired to Belgrade was, not that 
they were pursued thither, but that the Grand 
Signior himself was there awaiting their return 
— a fact which Mr. Bowen's favorite authority, 
Coxe, does not mention, but which may be 
found on p. 275, vol. 2, of Knolles' History of 
the Turks, continued by Sir Paul Rycaut, 
abridged by Mr. Savage, London, 1701, or in 
Rycaut's own ponderous folio. A few days 
after the fall of Gran, which took place in 
October, Sobieski set out for Poland, and on 



the 24th of December, or about two months 
afterwards, he and his army were in winter 
quarters at Cracow, having in the meantime 
performed a toilsome march of two hundred 
miles, across the snows of the Carpathian moun- 
tains. See Fletcher's Hist, of Poland, Am. ed., 
p. 111. Sobieski never returned to Hungary. 

Gran is more than 200 miles fmm Belgrade, 
and the Turks continued to hold the intervening 
country, as they had held it for a century and 
a half, having pashaws in the principal cities and 
garrisons in all the fortresses. They were ex- 
pelled from it gradually, in the course of two 
long and bloody wars, the last of which termin- 
ated in 1718, with the treaty of Passarowitz, by 
which the Turks relinquished their last posses- 
sions in Hungary. The proof of this from Coxe 
is, that on the same page from which Mr. Bowen 
took the above quotation, mention is made of 
the Turkish bashaw of Great Waradin, an im- 
portant Hungarian city, at a period considerably 
subsequent to Sobieski's departure; and on 
the next page, it is stated that " the surrender 
of Cassan again threw the principal parts of 
northern Hungary into the power of the emper- 
or ;" and the capture of Buda is recorded, the 
ancient Hungarian capital, which the Turks 
had held for 157 years. Buda is only 26 miles 
from Gran, and was not taken till 1686, three 
years after Sobieski's departure. Still further, 
on page 458, v. 2, Coxe states that by the treaty 
of Carlowitz, the date of which was 1699, Aus- 
tria regained " all Hungary north of the 
Marosch, and west of the Teiss ;" which still 
left a considerable province in possession of the 
Turks. The recovery of this province, which is 
known as the Bannat, is stated by Coxe, vol. 3, 
p. 403, to have taken place in 1718. This proof 
from Mr. Bowen's favorite authority will, I sup- 
pose, be sufficient to establish the truth of my 
remark, that all English historians do not sup- 
port his statement. But if more evidence be 
needed, I offer that of the Encyclopedia Amer- 
icana, which was mostly taken from the Ger- 
man, and was edited by a German scholar 
whose knowledge of history will not be ques- 
tioned, and who may reasonably be supposed to 
be well informed upon that of Austria. In the 
article on Hungary, vol. 6, pages 475-6, it is 
stated, that civil commotions " delayed the ex- 
pulsion of the Turks, in which Leopold I. finally 
succeeded so far that he retook Buda, 1686, and, 
by the peace of Carlowitz, 1699, recovered the 
rest of Hungary, except the Bannat" " The 
Congress of Passarowitz, 1718, restored the Ban- 
nat to Hungary." 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



17 



It is evident, therefore, that Mr. Bo wen was 
mistaken in asserting that the Turks were 
driven out of Hungary in 1683 by Sobieski, 
and that " Coxe, and every other English, 
French, and German historian, who have writ- 
ten the history of this period " supported his 
assertion ; and Mrs. Putnam's criticism was of 
course correct. 

Mr. Bo wen states "his fifth point thus : — [North 
American Review, p. 244.] 

" We had said that ' in the final struggle, the 
noted Tekeli and his partisans fought with the 
Turks against Sobieski ;' for proof of which, 
see Coxe and all other historians (except the 
Magyars) passim. The Examiner seems to deny 
this, by asserting that 'Sobieski was already 
dead at the time of the final struggle,' which it 
fixes in 1716; while on the authority given 
above, we placed it in 1683." 

It will be seen that Mr. Bowen's fourth and 
fifth points are essentially the same ; for Mrs. 
Putnam did not mean to deny, nor does she, to 
a candid reader, even seem to deny that Tekeli 
fought with the Turks against Sobieski. She 
merely intended to dissent from Mr. Bowen's 
assertion that Sobieski and Tekeli fought in 
the final struggle ; which dissent, I think, is 
not without justification from the fact, that the 
final struggle took place when the former had 
been dead twenty years, and the latter more 
than ten ; which renders it improbable that 
either of them fought in it, notwithstanding 
Mr. Bowen's reference to " Coxe and all other 
historians." To prevent misapprehension, it 
may be as well to remark that Mrs. Putnam 
gives 1716 as the date of the final struggle, be- 
cause the last great battle was fought in that 
year ; the treaty by which the Turks abandoned 
Hungary being dated two years later. 

Mr. Bowen, it will be noticed, repeats his as- 
sertion that the expulsion of the Turks from 
Hungary took place in 1683. Mrs. Putnam 
maintained, Ch. Ex. page 431, that he was mis- 
taken, and that it took place in 1718. I have 
brought sufficient proof that Mrs. Putnam was 
right. Mr. Bowen, however, in defending his 
fifth point, in his Letter to the Boston Daily 
Advertiser, quoted a passage frojn McCulloch's 
Universal Gazetteer, (Vol. i. p. 1145) where it is 
said, (speaking of the Hungarian nobles) " so 
great was their antipathy to the Austrian yoke, 
that in 1683 they rose, with Tekeli at their head, 
and called upon the Turks to relieve them from 
servitude. Austria, however, succeeded by the 
help of John Sobieski and Prince Eugene, in ex- 
pelling the Turks from these countries, &c." This 

2* 



quotation apparently sustains Mr. Bowen's as- 
sertion that the date of the Turkish expulsion 
was 1683, and does not sustain Mrs. Putnam's 
counter-assertion that it was 1718. I have 
copied the quotation exactly as it stands in Mr. 
Bowen's Letter. The reader will notice that it 
closes with a comma, after which Mr. Bowen 
puts, &c. Would any one have thought that 
the sentence which followed that comma, and 
which completed the passage thus partially quo- 
ted by Mr. Bowen, was this — " and they were 
finally secured to it by the treaties of Carloioitz 
and P assay owitz in 1718." 

The character of this transaction is easily un- 
derstood. Mr. Bowen has a controversy with 
Mrs. Putnam about the date of an important 
event in history. He states one year as the 
date, and she states another. He finds in Mc- 
Culloch's Universal Gazetteer, or Geographical 
Dictionary, a passage in which both dates are 
mentioned — the date for which Mrs. Putnam 
contends being given as that of the event in 
question, while the other is introduced as the 
date of a totally different event. Mr. Bowen 
quotes that portion of the passage which con- 
tains the date for which he was contending, and 
stopping at a comma, suppresses the sentence 
which proves the truth of Mrs. Putnam's posi- 
tion ! 

Soon after the appearance of Mr. Bowen's 
Letter in the Daily Advertiser, I reviewed it in 
the Boston Atlas, and exposed in nearly the 
foregoing manner, the true nature of this quota- 
tion from McCulloch. Mr. Bowen saw this ex- 
posure of his peculiar mode of quoting authori- 
ties, and in copying his Beply from the Daily 
Advertiser into the North American Review, 
he omits the mangled quotation which he had 
made from the first volume of McCulloch, and 
substitutes this passage from the second vol- 
ume — (speaking of Turkey under Solyman the 
Magnificent) : 

" At this period the Turkish empire was un- 
questionably the most powerful in the world. 
Nor had this mighty power even then reached 
its greatest height. Solyman was succeeded by 
other able princes, and the Ottoman arms con- 
tinued to maintain their ascendency over those 
of Christendom until in 1683, the famous John 
Sobieski, King of Poland, totally defeated the army 
employed in the siege of Vienna. This event 
marked the era of their decline.'" 

Mr. Bowen explains the substitution of the 
one passage for the other by the following note : 
— [North American Revieiv, p. 245.] 

"In a former publication of this paragraph, 
in a newspaper, in place of the sentence here 
cited from MeCulloch,Tanothcr sentence, which 



18 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



was quite irrelevant, was accidentally substi- 
tuted by a mistake of the copyist." 

This statement has, of course, all the weight 
that belongs to the word of a man who has oc- 
cupied the respectable post of Professor of His- 
tory in Harvard University. But it is so ex- 
ceedingly unsatisfactory, that I am compelled 
to declare I cannot give it implicit belief. It 
does not seem likely that a copyist would make 
such a mistake as to substitute a passage from 
one volume, for a greatly different passage in 
another volume. Nor do I understand how such 
a mistake could escape correction. Mr. Bowen, 
it is said, read his letter to some of his friends 
in Cambridge before he sent it to the Advertiser. 
Why did he not then detect the mistake ? Why 
did he not detect it when reading the proof? 
Or did he, a Professor of History in Harvard 
University, send long historical articles to the 
press, without examination or revisal, and that, 
too, concerning matters in which his intelli- 
gence and accuracy had been publicly impeach- 
ed ? And why did he let the mistake go uncor- 
rected for a month, when a note of a dozen lines, 
to the editor of the Advertiser, would have rec- 
tified it, instead of waiting till his unfair quota- 
tion had been exposed in the newspapers ? 
Why, too, did he pretend to refute Mrs. Put- 
nam by quoting against her the passage from 
the second volume of McCulloch, without mak- 
ing any reference to the passage in the first vol- 
ume which was so decisive in her favor? He, 
of course, must have read both of these pas- 
sages, or he could not have pointed them out to 
his copyist. 

But the consideration which to my mind is 
most decisive against the probability of the al- 
leged mistake, is this : The question at issue 
between him and Mrs. Putnam was about Tekeli 
and the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary. 
Now there is not a word about Tekeli or Hun- 
gary in the second quotation from McCulloch. 
It is altogether irrelevant, and merely says, 
what no one ever denied, that in 1683 Sobieski 
defeated the Turks before Vienna ; which 
11 event marked the era of their decline," Mc- 
Culloch says, meaning their apparent decline, for 
their real decline began with Lepanto. Sobies- 
ki's victory, instead of being the " final strug- 
gle," was only the first blow in the expulsion of 
the Turks from Hungary. That expulsion was 
accomplished by Prince Eugene in 1718, when 
Sobieski had been dead more than twenty years. 
But the first quotation, which Mr. Bowen says 
is " quite irrelevant," and was " accidentally 
substituted by a mistake of the copyist," does 



mention Tekeli and does speak of the affairs of 
Hungary. It was, in fact, the most relevant to 
his purpose that could have been found, if, un- 
fortunately for Mr. Bowen, the last clause of 
the sentence, which he suppressed, had not 
completely refuted the apparent meaning of the 
portion which he copied. The question was 
when, and by whom, were the Turks expelled 
from Hungary. Mr. Bowen said, in 1683, by So- 
bieski. Mrs. Putnam, and all historians say in 
1718, by Prince Eugene. And now, to give the 
finishing stroke to Mr. Bowen's quotations from 
McCulloch, I will complete his second extract 
from that author, by adding its conclusion. 

"The Ottoman arms continued to maintain 
their ascendency over those of Christendom un- 
til, in 1683, the famous John Sobieski, King of 
Poland, totally defeated the army employed in 
the siege of Vienna. This event marked the 
era of their decline. For a tchile they continued 
to oppose the Austrians and Hungarians with 
doubtful fortune and various success ; but the vic- 
tories of Prince Eugene gave a decisive superiority 
to the Christians." — [Vol. ii. p. 977.] 

Perhaps this was omitted " accidentally" — 
"by a mistake of the copyist" ! 

Mr. Bowen states his sixth point thus : — [N. 
A. K, p. 245.] 

Commenting on our assertion that the Turks 
held possession of nearly half of Hungary for a 
century and a half after Ferdinand came to the 
throne, the Examiner says : • this then was the 
protection which the Hungarians found from 
their enemies in the union with Austria ; ' and 
again, ' Austria neither protected the Hunga- 
rians from the Turks, nor suffered them effec- 
tually to protect themselves.' This is really 
too bad. During the whole period in question, 
the greatest part of the Magyars were not the 
enemies, but the active allies and friends of the 
Turks, against the Christian powers of Europe; 
their leaders, John of Zapolya and his posterity, 
and Tekeli and others, could not have kept up 
the contest with Austria for a month, except by 
the aid of the infidels. 

This is not a fair statement of Mrs. Putnam's 
position. Mr. Bowen in the North American 
Review [Jan. 1850, p. 97] had said, in order to 
demonstrate the value to Hungary of the Aus- 
trian connection, that since the battle of Mohacs, 
in 1526, the Hungarians " have found protec- 
tion from their enemies [the Turks] only by 
their union with Austria." He also stated, 
that for a century and a half after the battle of 
Mohacs, the Turks had possession of full half 
of the kingdom, although before that battle 
the Hungarians had repeatedly driven them 
back, and protected not only Hungary, but the 
rest of Europe from their incursions. Mrs, 
Putnam commented on these inconsistent state- 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



19 



merits, and said very truly, "Austria neither 
protected the Hungarians from the Turks, nor 
suffered them effectually to protect themselves. 
It was when their armies were commanded by 
Austrian generals, and their cities filled with 
Austrian garrisons, — it was when Austrian 
misgovernment and falsehood had divided the 
nation against itself — that the Hungarians were 
forced to submit to the Turks." Evidently, Mr. 
Bowen's sixth point is not more defensible than 
the others. He asserted that the Hungarians 
found protection from the Turks only by their 
union with Austria. Mrs. Putnam replied that 
by his own statement the Turks had possession 
of half the kingdom for a century and a half 
after the accession of the Austrian dynasty, 
whereas, previous to that accession the Hunga- 
rians had protected not only their own country 
but the rest of Europe from them. It is true 
that during that century and a half, the Hun- 
garians frequently fought with the Turks against 
the Austrians, but it was because they invaria- 
bly experienced better treatment from the Turks 
than from the Austrians. The infidels granted 
them religious toleration, while the Catholic 
House of Austria sought to extirpate their na- 
tional Protestant faith by cruelties unparalelled 
in Europe since the days of Domitian and Nero. 
If anything more is needed to be said on this 
point, I will cite the authority of M. Degerando, 
one of the most accurate and intelligent of the 
writers on Hungary, who, on page 9 of his valu- 
able work de V Esprit Public en Hongrie, after re- 
marking that Austrian intrigues had divided and 
enfeebled the country from even the time of 
Hunniades, but that the Turks could effect no- 
thing against it under the Magyar Kings, 
says — 

" Even after the battle of Mohacs, Sultan Soly- 
man quitted Hungary without retaining posses- 
sion of a single village. When he again invaded 
Hungary the country was under the dominion 
of the Austrian Ferdinand, so that it may, with 
strict truth, be said that the Turks who could 
not conquer Hungary Irom the Hungarians, 
conquered it from the Austrians. If for a hun- 
dred and fifty years the Pashaws encamped on 
the soil of Hungary, it was owing to the policy 
of Austria." 

It will be seen that the statement of Deger- 
ando is identical with that made by Mrs. Put- 
nam, which Mr. Bowen affects to consider 
" really too bad." 

Mr. Bowen's seventh point is stated in this 
way, N. A. R. p 245 : — 

"The Examiner objects to our calling both 
John Hunniades and his son, the almost equally 
renowned Corvinus, kings of Hungary, by say- 



ing that the former was not a king, but only 
4 governor of Hungary.' He was a king in fact, 
though not in name, just as Charles Martel and 
Pepin were really kings of France, though nomi- 
nally only mayors of the palace. Gibbon does 
not hesitate to speak of the reign of Hunniades, 
in the same sentence in which he alludes to ' the 
titular king, Ladislaus of Austria.' " 

Had Mr. Bowen quoted the whole of the pas- 
sage in Gibbon, to which he refers, it would 
have been apparent to his readers that Mrs. 
Putnam was right in her criticism, for Gibbon 
explicitly says, not that Hunniades was&«?^, but 
that he w r as supreme captain and governor of Hun- 
gary. The passage is near the middle of the 
67th chapter of the Decline and Fall, and is so 
short that I can see no good reason for Mr. Bow- 
en's not quoting it. " During the absence and 
minority of Ladislaus of Austria the titular king, 
Hunniades was elected supreme captain and gov- 
ernor of Hungary ; and if envy at first w r as silenc- 
ed by terror, a reign of twelve years supposes the 
art of policy as well as of war." This is very far 
from supporting Mr. Bowen's distinct assertion 
that Hunniades was king of Hungary- — on the 
contrary, it refutes it. Gibbon evidently used 
the word reign, in this place, as a synonym of 
administration, without intending to convey the 
idea of royalty. Mr. Bowen's remark that Hun- 
niades was " a king in fact, though not in name," 
is not to the purpose. It might be properly said 
that Richelieu and Mazarin w r ere kings of France, 
" in fact, though not in name ; " but the writer 
who, in treating of French history, should speak 
of " those renowned kings, Armand de Richelieu 
and Julius Mazarin," would be commonly held 
to have made a ridiculous blunder. It may be 
remarked also, that in speaking of Corvinus as 
"almost equally renowned" with his father, 
Hunniades, Mr. Bowen betrays an ignorance of 
European history which could scarcely have 
been looked for in a person holding the profess- 
orship of history in Harvard University. King 
Matthias Corvinus was, in every respect, greater 
and more renowned than his father. 

Mr. Bowen's eighth and last point is of little 
consequence. He states and defends it thus, N. 
A. R. p. 245. 

" We once used the abbreviated expression 
'Emperor of Austria,' instead of the more com- 
mon phrase, • Emperor of the House of Austria.' 
Of course the former expression is just as cor- 
rect as the latter; for the sovereigns in question 
were emperors (of the Holy Roman Empire) 
an appellation which had become merely titular 
for more than a century before Francis resigned 
it, so that they were usually designated by ad- 
ding the name of their hereditary dominions." 



so 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



This is not an entirely accurate statement of 
the case. In the North American Review, Jan. 
1850, p. 97, Mr. Bowen asserted "that Hungary 
made choice, so long as her monarchy remained 
elective, of the Emperor of Austria to be her 
king." Upon which Mrs. Putnam remarked 
that " there were no Emperors of Aixstria during 
the period that the Hungarian monarchy re- 
mained elective, nor for more than a hundred 
years afterwards. This title did not exist until 
the present century. It was assumed in 1804, 
by Francis, in anticipation of the loss of that of 
Emperor of Germany, which he resigned in 
1806." Mrs. Putnam was, of course, correct, 
and Mr. Bowen's expression was inaccurate, 
though, I presume, the inaccuracy was owing to 
carelessness, rather than to ignorance. But in 
his reply, Mr. Bowen fails into another inaccu- 
racy, in saying that the common phrase for the 
sovereigns in question, was "Emperor of the 
House of Austria," during the century that pre- 
ceded the resignation of Francis. They were 
commonly known as Emperors of Germany. 

I have now considered all the points in which 
Mr. Bowen attempts to reply to Mrs. Putnam, 
and I have shown, chiefly from his own author- 
ities and references, that in every case Mrs. 
Putnam was right, and he wrong. I have also 
shown that he has misrepresented Mrs. Put- 
nam, and perverted her language, in order to 
make out that she "praised the Austrian pol- 
icy" — that he has charged her with "incredi- 
ble ignorance," when by the terms of his own 
statement, it is evident that he knew she was 
not ignorant — and that to convict her of injus- 
tice to him, he has referred to authors as if they 
sustained him, when he could not, by any de- 
gree of carelessness, have failed to see that they 
really supported her ; and that, furthermore, 
he has made quotations to prove that she was 
wrong, suppressing portions of those quotations 
which proved that she was right. 

Let me now ask the reader's attention to the 
following passage from Mr. Bowen's Letter to 
the Daily Advertiser : 

" I have now considered all the specifications 
in the charge of blundering in my statements 
of historic facts, and can safely leave the reader 
to form his own opinion of them. One of two 
conclusions must be true : — Either the Exami- 
ner is grossly ignorant of the most notorious facts 
stated by the most common historians, or it has de- 
liberately forged historical statements in order to 
damage my reputation, and deprive me of office, 
thinking that a bold and confident utterance of 
them might cause them to pass as truths with 
the ignorant, the malicious, or the unwary; — 



a hope in which, so far as the editors of the 
Times, the Transcript and the Tribune are con- 
cerned, it has not been deceived. This is strong 
language, I confess ; but in view of all the cir- 
cumstances attending this gross attack upon my 
character, subsistence, and even personal safety, 
I leave it to the public to judge if it be not 
fully deserved." 

This, it will be observed, contains a direct 
charge against Mrs. Putnam, of having " delib- 
erately forged historical statements" in order 
to damage Mr. Bowen's reputation, and deprive 
him of office, — the office of Professor of History 
in Harvard University. It is true, that Mr. 
Bowen makes this atrocious charge under cover 
of an alternative ; but it is equally true that 
that alternative has nothing whatever to do 
with the matter. Whether Mrs. Putnam be 
"grossly ignorant" or not grossly ignorant, 
could have no effect on the deliberate forgery 
of historical statements with which he charges 
her, thinking, I suppose, that " a bold and con 
fident utterance of the charge might cause it to 
pass as truth with the ignorant, the malicious, or 
the unwary." 

This, then, is the position in which Mr. 
Bowen has placed himself with regard to Mrs. 
Putnam. He has utterly failed in attempting 
to refute her courteous exposure of his mistakes 
in Hungarian history, and in making the at- 
tempt, he has grossly misrepresented her mean- 
ing, perverted her language, and has made the 
most unfair quotations, to cover up his blunders 
and convict her of ignorance and injustice ; and 
then, after all this, he turns round and indig- 
nantly charges her — a lady of distinguished 
learning and ability, and of the highest social 
standing — with having deliberately forged his- 
torical statements, in order to damage his repu- 
tation, and deprive him of office ! 



Mil. BOWEN S LAST ARTICLE AGAINST HUNGARY. 

As I have already stated, Mr. Bowen has 
copied into the North American Review for 
January, 1851, the principal portion of his 
Reply to Mrs. Putnam, which first appeared in 
the Boston Daily Advertiser. He has added 
nothing to his Eight Points except a note on 
the persistence of the Magyars in styling their 
king Ferdinand Fifth instead of First, and anoth- 
er note, explaining the " mistake of the copy- 
ist " in the matter of the quotations from Mc- 
Culloch, both of which notes I have considered 
above. In this last article, Mr. Bowen speaks 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



21 



of his first one,— the "War of Races" — as a 
" plain and inoffensive statement of historical 
facts concerning a nation upon the eastern con- 
fines of Europe, with whom our countrymen 
had had no political, commercial or literary re- 
lations whatever, and of whose history they 
might fairly be presumed to know as little as 
they did of the early annals of China." 

This passage, which is otherwise of no impor- 
tance, deserves notice as an illustration of the 
peculiar recklessness with which Mr. Eowen 
makes assertions, and of his disregard for accu- 
racy, even when inaccuracy can be of no service 
to him. Hungary is not a country upon the 
eastern confines of Europe. It is exactly in 
the centre of Europe, with regard to east and 
west ; and, in fact, approaches a little nearer to 
the western, than to the eastern boundary of 
Europe. The statement that we " had had no po- 
litical, commercial or literary relations whatever 
with Hungary," is intended, I presume, as an 
assertion that when Mr. Bowen wrote his first 
article, we had no accessible means of informa- 
tion about that country. But for several years 
we have had all the political relations with 
Hungary that any nation, except Austria, can 
have; that is, we have maintained an embassy 
at the Court of the Hungarian King. Indeed, 
the political intercourse between our govern- 
ment and that of the Empire of whichllun- 
gary is the most important part, began at a very 
early stage of our national existence, as may be 
seen from Mr. "Webster's Letter to the Chevalier 
Hulsemann. Our commercial relations with 
Hungary, it is true, have been very slight, but 
as for our literary relations with that country, 
if by the term, Mr. Bowen intends means of in- 
formation, we had them in abundance long be- 
fore he began to write his articles. Bowring's 
Poetry of the Magyars is a well known book, 
the works of Paget and of many other English 
travellers, could be found in our libraries, while 
every large geographical work contains an ac- 
count of Hungary, in some cases a very good 
one, like that of McCulloch, which is as long as 
an ordinary article in the North American Re- 
view, and furnishes statements which com- 
pletely refute Mr. Bowen's conclusions. Nearly 
every English journal of note had published 
elaborate articles on the subject before his 
"War of Races" appeared, and that essay, 
as I have previously stated, was derived alto- 
gether from the most widely circulated of 
French periodicals, La Revue des Deux Mondes. 
In fact, his assertion, that of the history of 
Hungary, our countrymen " might fairly be 



presumed to know as little as they did of the 
early annals of China," although it may be 
true of Mr. Bowen himself, when he began to 
write on the subject, is not time of those among 
us — and their number is not few — who have 
studied general history more than is needed for 
the getting-up of a review article ; nor is it con- 
sistent with Mr. Bowen's own statements else- 
where. For, in attempting to reply to Mrs. Put- 
nam's exposure of his blunders in Hungarian his- 
tory, he Bays he shall " confute them by referen- 
ces to such authorities as are in the hands of every- 
body,— to pages with which a schoolboy may be 
supposed to be familiar." These authorities he 
enumerates as Gibbon, Robertson, Coxe, Pro- 
fessor Smyth and others. Others, in Mr. Bow- 
en's peculiar style, simply means McCulloch, 
from whose Geographical Dictionary he makes 
some extracts, the character of which I have 
shown above. Now Gibbon, Robertson, Smyth 
and McCulloch have all been republished and 
widely circulated in this country, while Coxe's 
House of Austria has long been a standard 
work for libraries, and for some years past could 
be obtained in a cheap form at almost any book- 
store in our cities. If these, then, are "good 
authorities for the History of Hungary," (N. A. 
Review, Jan., 1851, p. 241,) and are "in the 
hands of everybody," even of " schoolboys," 
what becomes of the dense ignorance which Mr. 
Bowen assumes to have existed on the subject ? 

Mr. Bowen omits in the North American, the 
atrocious charges of "falsehood" and "for- 
gery," and of making a " gross attack upon his 
character, subsistence, and personal safety," 
which he dealt out so vehemently against Mrs. 
Putnam in the Daily Advertiser, though he has 
not the sense of justice, to make the least retrac- 
tion or apology for them — unless their silent 
withdrawal, in this second edition of his reply, 
may be construed as an acknowledgment that 
he is conscious of his error. But even in this 
better- considered article, his laneua^e is not 
free from offensiveness. He still persists in his 
absurd sneers at Mrs. Putnam's knowledge of 
the Magyar language, and again affirms that her 
article "appears to have been written, not so 
much for the purpose of explaining the nature 
of the war in Hungary, as for that of damaging 
the reputation of the only American writer who 
has dared to plead the cause of ten millions of 
oppressed and down-trodden Slavonians, Wal- 
lachians," &c. 

He says, for instance, on p. 240 : 

" The character of the whole article, which is 
nearly seventy pages long, may be interred with 



22 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



sufficient accuracy from a single statement in it, 
which we copy as a curiosity, for it is certainly 
one of the most astounding assertions on record. 
The only facts alleged in immediate confirmation 
of it, are those which we have already consid- 
ered in a foot-note on page 226 s « Since the reign 
of St. Stephen, all the races inhabiting the kingdom 
have composed the Hungarian nation, and have 
shared equally in all its honors and all its suffer- 
ings.' — Christian Examiner for November, 1850, 
p. 466. 

" We have no doubt, whatever, that the wri- 
ter fully believed this marvelous statement at 
the time of making it. It only shows how far 
one may be misled by a little pardonable vanity, 
arising from the consciousness of having ac- 
quired some knowledge of the Magyar language, 
a very rare, if not unique accomplishment for 
one not born in Hungary, and by implicit reli- 
ance on a single, but very untrustworthy source 
of information*" 

It is not necessary to comment upon the good 
taste of Mr. Bowen's allusion to Mrs. Putnam's 
knowledge of the Magyar language, nor upon 
his logic in attempting to refute a historical 
statement by sneering at the "vanity" of the 
person who has made it. The justice of his im. 
putation of " implicit reliance on a single source 
of information " (he means the Magyar) may be 
comprehended from the fact, that Mrs. Putnam's 
article contains extracts from every book or 
writer referred to by Mr. Bowen himself in the 
' ' "War of Races," and that it is chiefly by his 
own authorities that she refutes him. She 
quoted besides from a number of German au- 
thorities, and scarcely at all from Magyar writers. 

The passage from Mrs. Putnam's article on 
which Mr. Bowen lays such stress, needs no 
defence to any one who is tolerably well ac- 
quainted with the history of Hungary, and I do 
not understand how, if Mr. Bowen has read one 
half of the books he quotes from or refers to, he 
can have any doubt whatever of its truth. In 
the North American Review for Jan. 1850, pp. 
99, 91, he said: 

" The present position of the Magyars in Hun- 
gary is very much what that of the Normans in 
England was, for the first century or two after 

the conquest To break the spirit 

of the conquered Saxons by the insults as much 
as by the losses inflicted upon them, to proscribe 
their language as well as to rob them of their 
estates, to ridicule their habits, and to brand 
them as an inferior and degraded race, who 
were unfit to hold office, and unworthy to bear 
arms, was the settled policy of the earlier Nor- 
man kings." 

Mrs. Putnam, commenting on this ridiculous 
passage, said very truly [Ch. Ex. Nov. 1850, pp. 
466-7] ; 



" We have already shown that no such con- 
dition of things as that supposed by the Review- 
er, has existed in Hungary for at least eight 
hundred years. Since the reign of St. Stephen, 
all the races inhabiting the kingdom, have com- 
posed the Hungarian nation, and have shared 
equally in all its honors and all its sufferings. 
Was then this state of things introduced in the 
Spring of 1848, when the Hungarians obtained 
a virtual independence of Austria ? Did the Mag- 
yars seize this occasion to exclude their fellow 
countrymen from the privileges of citizenship ? 
Were the other races branded at that time, as 
inferior and degraded, and declared unworthy of 
bearing arms and of holding office ? The first 
officer commissioned by the Hungarian ministry, 
at the commencement of the insurrectionary 
movement in Croatia and Slavonia, was the Sla- 
vonian Hrabowszky ; in the first battle which 
was fought in the late war, the Hungarians were 
commanded by the Wallachian Moga ; one of 
the most distinguished of their generals was the 
Servian Damianich ; when sentence of expulsion 
from the throne had been pronounced on the 
house of Hapsburg, the first act of the indepen- 
dent nation was to confer the highest office in 
the State upon the ' Slovac' Kossuth." 

Mr. Bowen, it will be seen, compares the 
present position of the Magyars in Hungary with 
that of the Normans in England for the first 
century or two after the Conquest ; and by in- 
ference, compares the condition of the Slavo- 
nians, Wallachians, &c, to that of the conquer- 
ed Saxons, who were branded as an inferior and 
degraded race, unfit to hold office, and unwor- 
thy to bear arms. Mrs. Putnam demolishes 
this most absurd statement by a simple reference 
to the well known facts that Hrabowsky, Moga, 
Damianich and Kossuth, none of them Mag- 
yars, held high military and civil offices during 
the late war — a war which Mr. Bowen main- 
tains to have been on the part of the Magyars, 
nothing but a struggle to keep the other races 
in an oppressed and degraded condition, from 
which enlightened and liberal Austria was fight- 
ing to relieve them. In one of the above quo- 
tations, Mr. Bowen says he has "considered in 
a foot note on page 226," these facts about the 
elevation of Kossuth, Moga, &c. 

Now, let us see in what manner he has " con- 
sidered " them. Hrabowszky, he says, " is 
nearly allied to Count Zichy, one of the most 
influential Magyar nobles in Hungary ! " Mr. 
Bowen does not condescend to explain how a 
man of an "inferior and degraded race," came 
to be " nearly allied to one of the most influen- 
tial Magyar nobles." " The Wallachian Moga," 
he says, "Kossuth deposed immediately after 
that first battle, and put Georgey, a Magyar 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



23 



noble, in his place." Mr. Bowen means— if he 
means anything, except to throw dust in the 
eyes of his readers—that Moga was deposed be- 
cause he was a Wallachian, and Georgey put in 
his place, because he was a Magyar, without 
any reference to the military talents or conduct of 
the two generals. But how came Moga to be ap- 
pointed, and permitted to fight the first battle of 
the war, if the race to which he belonged was 
" deemed inferior and degraded, and unworthy 
of holding office ?" That is the question, and 
Mr. Bowen's pretended answer to it, is simply 
an insult to the common sense of his readers. 
Schlesinger, from whom he got the fact, says 
(vol. i., p. 81): 

" Moga exposed his troops in this engagement 
in an unpardonable manner ; and the main body 
of the Magyar army would have been lost, had 
not the retreat been ordered in time. On this 
occasion, the great talent of Kossuth displayed 
itself; with a keen penetration and discern- 
ment, possessed only by men of highly-gifted 
natures, he detected among thousands the man 
worthy to take the future command of the army. 
It was Georgey who first directed Kossuth's 
attention to the faulty tactics of Moga. Kos- 
suth raised Georgey to the rank of General 
upon the field of battle, and invested him with 
the command the following day." 

Kossuth and Damianich, Mr. Bowen says, 
were Magyarized nobles, and, " as is usual with 
renegades, were more fanatically Magyar than 
the Magyars themselves " ! He makes no at- 
tempt to explain how these men of " inferior 
and degraded races " came to be Magyarized 
nobles, and elevated to the highest offices of the 
State. 

The fact is, that Mr. Bowen's position on 
this subject of races in Hungary is utterly and 
even absurdly wrong. I am at a loss to con- 
ceive how he could retain it for a moment, after 
reading the works from which he quotes. If 
indeed he has read them or any of them, he 
must know that he is wrong. He must know 
that the other races were not slaves or serfs to 
the Magyars, or even politically oppressed by 
them. There was formerly a noble class and a 
peasant class in Hungary — the noble class hav- 
ing great and exclusive privileges. But there 
were millions of Magyar peasants and tens of 
thousands of nobles of Slavonic and Wallachian 
race. By a series of legislative acts, urged on 
by the nobles themselves, in many cases against 
the opposition of the Austrian government, and 
extending over a period beginning with 1832 
and ending with 1848, the exclusive privileges 
of the nobles were relinquished, and the peas- 
ants raised to a perfect equality with them be- 



fore the law. So far were the Croatians from 
being oppressed, that they in fact had peculiar 
privileges above even the Magyars, as I shall 
show hereafter. 

I cannot better illustrate the absurdity of the 
articles in the North American than by suppos- 
ing a parallel case, which I think will exactly 
match that of Mr. Bowen, and will also illus- 
trate his mode of reasoning. I will suppose a 
Hungarian Reviewer as prejudiced against this 
country as Mr. Bowen is against Hungary, and 
that in the course of his profound researches, 
he has discovered that our white population 
consists of several distinct races, speaking dif- 
ferent languages, viz. : the Anglo-Saxon, the 
Dutch in New York, the Germans in Pennsyl- 
vania, the French in Louisiana, and the Irish 
everywhere. He takes it into his head that the 
Anglo-Saxons, known also as Yankees and as 
Americans, which latter title they sometimes 
" arrogate to themselves," as Mr. Bowen says the 
Magyars do that of Hungarians, oppress and 
degrade the other races, and do not allow them 
to hold office. To substantiate this position, he 
quotes from English travellers, to show what an 
uncivilized, vainglorious, grasping, domineer- 
ing race the Americans are. He quotes from 
Knickerbocker's History of New York, and 
from Irving' s other works, from Paulding's 
novels, from jest books, and from the speeches of 
the St. Nicholas Society, abundant proof that 
the Dutch mortally hate and abhor the Yan- 
kees, and that the Yankees defraud and oppress 
the Dutch. He refers to the Anti-Kent dis- 
turbance, as an illustration of the way in which 
the Dutch peasantry are trampled on by their 
aristocratic tyrants, and relates how their strug- 
gle for freedom was crushed by the Yankee 
militia, led by an Anglo-Saxon officer, the sher- 
iff. He quotes from documents and newspa- 
pers, to show in what a state of profound igno- 
rance the Anglo-Saxons have kept the Germans 
of Pennsylvania, and how deeply they have 
loaded them with public debt in order to debase 
and crush them, at the same time " daring to 
boast themselves as the friends of education 
and advocates of equal laws." He quotes all 
that has been written, so far as it will suit his 
purpose, about the dislike entertained by the 
French of Louisiana to the Americans, and the 
annoyance they have experienced from the rest- 
less, ambitious and improving spirit of the latter 
people. He refers to the most authentic works 
to prove that some time ago — he takes care not 
to specify the precise period — these French 
were dissatisfied with the American yoke, and 



24 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



were inclined to hail the British as deliverers ; j battle field, was, " Give 'em hell, boys ! " [See 
and details the high-handed proceedings of the.N. A. Review, pp. 224-5-6-7, Jan. 1851, where 



American General, Jackson, who kept them 
down by terrorism, proclaiming martial law and 
imprisoning all who opposed him. He relates 
also, in this connection, with a convenient 
omission of dates, the pathetic history of the 
Acadians, who were expelled from their homes 
by a Yankee force led by a Yankee commander. 
Colonel Winslow. 

To show how the Irish are oppressed and de- 
based, he copies descriptions of their mode of 
life in the cellars and garrets of our great cities 
he anatyzes public documents, to prove that 
vast numbers of them have been consigned to 
jails and workhouses, by their relentless Yankee 
masters : he cites passages from newspapers, to 
show how ruthlessly their convents have been 
burnt at midnight by Yankee mobs, and how 
the same haughty oppressors have shot them 
down in the streets of Philadelphia, and sacked 
and destroyed their churches and dwelling- 
houses. He culls from Native American 
speeches and articles everything tending to 
prove what a deep hatred exists between the 
races, and how determined the aristocratic 
Americans are to keep the Irish in subjection. 
Finally, he mixes up these quotations with ex- 
tracts from works by Smith, Brown and Jones, 
from pamphlets and newspapers, all proving 
conclusively that che Pequods were extermina- 
ted, the Cherokees deprived of their lands, the 
Seminoles hunted with bloodhounds, the tories 
tarred and feathered, the cow-boys and skinners 
hung, the Mormons persecuted, and the Nulli- 
fiers, (whom he takes to be a distinct race,) 
ground to the earth and goaded to rebellion by 
unjust revenue laws, enacted by the domineer- 
ing Yankees. To demonstrate the oppressed and 
degraded condition of South Carolina, (the 
American Croatia,) he cites the speech of Mr. 
Pvhettinthe United States Senate, Dec. 16, 1851, 
in which it is emphatically declared that " the 
tyranny of this government over the South is 
more ruthless than that of Austria which en- 
slaved Hungary." 

He proves, in the same way, by judicious quo- 
tations, that Major Andre was executed as a 
spy ; that Joe Smith was shot at midnight by a 
band of Anglo-Saxon assassins ; that Gen. Lin- 
gan was murdered by a Baltimore mob ; that 
Washington was an ambitious rebel, so parsi- 
monious that he sold his old war-horse when 
his campaigns were ended ; and that Gen. Tay- 
lor was a blood-thirsty ruffian, who hunted 
Indians with dogs, and whose only order on the 



Mr. Bowen expatiates on the atrocities of the 
Magyars and the savage and vile character of 
their leading generals and statesmen.] 

The Hungarian reviewer might then trium- 
phantly appeal to his bewildered readers, and 
exclaim, almost in the words of Mr. Bowen — 
"Behold this formidable array of authorities ! I 
have summoned into Court a crowd of reputable 
and unim peached witnesses, professing all forms 
of political doctrine, whose united and harmo- 
nious testimony can leave no doubt upon a 
mind of ordinary capacity. I have merely used 
their language instead of my own. Since the 
fall of the aristocracies of Venice and Poland, 
the Yankees in America, with few exceptions, 
have been the most arrogant, cruel and tyran- 
nical nobility iii the world. I have proved 
that their leaders were corrupt and merciless, and 
that the other races of their country were deemed 
inferior and degraded, and unworthy of holding 
office." And if some better informed person 
should civilly enquire — w If this last statement 
of yours be true, how did it happen that Jack- 
son, of the Irish race, and Van Buren, of the 
Dutch race, were elected Presidents, while 
Soule, of the French race, was admitted to the 
Senate, and Muhlenberg,of the German race, was 
sent Ambassador to our own Court at Vienna ? " 
— ■ the Hungarian Mr. Bowen might reply, as 
his American prototype has done — "I do not 
deny your facts — but X will explain them — 
I will • consider " them. Jackson was allied by 
marriage to an influential Anglo-Saxon family. 
Van Buren was • deposed ' at the end of his 
first term, and the Anglo-Saxon Harrison put 
in his place. As for Soule and Muhlenberg, 
they were completely Americanized, and as is 
usual with renegades, were more fanatically 
American than the Americans themselves ! " 

This may be deemed by those who have not 
examined the subject, an extravagant caricature 
of Mr. Bowen's articles on Hungary. But hav- 
ing carefully read the principal books from 
which he quotes and misquotes, I can confidently 
affirm that it is not exaggerated. The sketch 
of the imaginary Hungarian reviewer's opinion 
of this country, contains in proportion to its 
length, more facts and fewer false inferences 
than Mr. Bowen's statements about Hungary. 
The reader can judge for himself whether there 
be any difference between the logic of the two 
reviewers so far as Kossuth, Moga, &c, on the 
one side, and Jackson, Van Buren, &c, on the 
other, are concerned. 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



25 



MS. BOWELS ANTI-HUNGARIAN AUTHORITIES. 

The " formidable array of Authorities " refer- 
red to active, forms the main portion Of Mr. 
Bowen's last article on Hungary, and consists of 
a confused mass of extracts from " English, 
Trench, German and Hungarian writers," com- 
prising, I believe, about seventy distinct cita- 
tions, strung together without explanation or 
comment. These extracts, which Mr. Bowen 
calls " a formidable array of authorities," are 
chiefly taken from anonymous pamphlets — from 
Austrian documents whose falsity has been fully 
exposed by the English press — and from books 
long ago published, relating to a condition o*f 
things that had ceased to exist in Hungary, 
years before the war began. The titles of ten 
English and German books are prefixed to the 
article — four of these were published at Vienna, 
in 1849 and 1850, subject to the most rigid cen- 
sorship, and while the city was in a state of 
siege — another appeared at Presburg in 1849, 
under the candid and impartial sanction of Hay- 
nau and his martial law ; and of the remaining 
five, tioo are anonymous ; one is by a notorious 
Austrian partisan, Count Mailath ; and another 
was published in London eleven years ago, is a 
work of no authority whatever, and so far as 
Mr. Bowen quotes it, does not say a word about 
races, or relate at all to the recent condition of 
Hungary. One only of the ten works, that of 
Schlesinger, is of any value, and the quotations 
from that are so perverted by omissions that 
they convey, or seem to convey the very reverse 
of what the author intended ; and the same 
thing is true of the quotations from most of the 
other respectable works whose titles are not in- 
cluded among the ten : for Mr. Bowen quotes 
from several books whose titles he has not pre- 
fixed to his article. 

Prominent among these "authorities" is 
"Hungary: its Constitution and its Catastrophe. 
By Corvinus.'" Corvinus is a great name in 
Hungarian history ; it was the surname of the 
famous Hunniades and of his still more famous 
son, king Mathias Corvinus. Doubtless, many 
of Mr. Bow r en's readers were familiar with the 
name, and doubtless some of them have sup- 
posed that " Corvinus," was a well-known and 
respectable Hungarian authority. I have heard 
of one or two who thought so. Mr. Webb, of the 
N. Y. Courier and Enquirer, who has, without 
acknowledgment, made use of Mr. Bowen's 
quotations as if he had himself read the books 
from which they are taken, speaks of " the his- 
torian Corvinus," as if he were sorr e well-known 

3 



writer. Mr. Bowen relies greatly on Corvinus. 
He makes thirteen extracts from him, which 
cover six or seven of his thirty pages. And 
what does the reader suppose this work to be ? 
It lies before me as I write — an anonymous 
pamphlet, with a green paper cover, written by 
some English scribbler, who took " Corvinus " 
as a nom de plume, as one would take " Junius," 
or "Brutus," or "Publicola," or O. P. Q., or 
X. Y. Z. It may be written by an Austrian 
agent, by an Englishman in the Austrian ser- 
vice (there are hundreds in the army), or by 
some paid advocate of Metternich or Haynau. 
The thing is too contemptible for serious notice, 
but I will give one illustration of the way in 
which Mr. Bowen has used even this " authori- 
ty." Mr. Bowen's theory is, that the late war 
in Hungary was a struggle on the part of the 
Hungarian nobles to maintain their ancient con- 
stitution, and the dominion which it gave them 
over what he calls their serfs and subject races, 
the Croatians, Slavonians, Wallachians, &c, and 
that there was nothing republican about it. 
It is to sustain this theory that he has arranged 
his quotations, as well from " Corvinus " as 
from others. " Corvinus " himself, on the first 
page of his pamphlet, speaking of the Diet of 
which Kossuth was the leader, and which began 
the war, says : 

" A spirit came over that Diet which no ad- 
ministrative reforms could satisfy — a spirit 
totally at variance with the genius of the Ancient 
Constitution, which established its ascendency 
by abrogating that constitution, and sought to 
maintain it by sacrificing the monarchy. There 
can be no greater error than to suppose that the 
war of 1848-9 was a movement in defence of 
the time-honored institutions, which had then- 
roots in the laws of St. Stephen and Andreas 
II." 

Tn fact, the object of this anonymous pamph- 
let was, to render the Hungarian war unpopular 
in England, by showing that it was a republican 
and democratic movement. 

Another of these " authorities " is an " Offi- 
cial List of 467 persons executed by the Hunga- 
rian Revolutionary Government," which was 
published at Vienna last year, in justification of 
the cruelties of Haynau and the other Austrian 
generals, and to throw odium on the Hunga- 
rians. The greater portion of it was translated 
and published in the London Times of Sept. 10th 
and 11th, 1850, under the title of the Magyar 
Bloody Assize, as a vindication of Gen. Haynau, 
after the attack upon him by Messrs. Barclay & 
Perkins's draymen. It was treated with con- 
tempt and ridicule by the English press gener- 
ally, and its absurd falsities exposed in the most 



26 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



triumphant manner. The worthlessness of the 
thing is transparent, as I can show, merely by 
making a few extracts. Mr. Bowen has filled 
two pages of the North American Review with 
quotations from it, carefully selecting those 
which would best bear examination. Some of 
the cases he has cited stand in immediate jux- 
taposition with the following, which I copy, 
word for word, from the Times, in every case 
giving the entire statement : — 

" Gyika Marian was shot at Koratzintz on the 
20th of October, 1848, for attempting to strangle 
one of the insurgent magistrates." 

" Gligor Stank, justice of Dulcse, Arad Coun- 
ty, was shot for hunting the lady of the manor with 
dogs through the Jorest, with intent to kill her or to 
do her some grievous bodily harm " (/) 

" John Kowatsch, Honved, [Hungarian sol- 
dier] of Worcse, County of Congrad, was hanged 
on the 7th of October, 1848, for having assassin- 
ated one of his comrades" (!) 

" L. Hassinger, a Jew from Pesth, was shot on 
the 3rd of June, for having, whilst acting as a 
spy to the rebel army, betrayed their movements 
to the Austrian troops." 

" N. Wuinow, a peasant, was accused of having 
murdered a Hungarian spy. He was shot at 
Palandy in April, 1849. 

" Th. Stettin, a borderer, was shot for mutiny 
by the orders of General Bern" (!) 

"A peasant, name unknown, was hanged at 
Verschetz, in May, 1849, for killing one of the 
rebel Hussars " (!) 

" Stefan Doho and John Vorbasz, of Szgedin, 
were in February, 1849, tried and executed at 
Kanissa, for murdering Major Tar of the Hon- 
veds" (!) 

Three-fourths of the list are of this character. 
The persons put to death were spies, traitors, 
and deserters, or were convicted of murder and 
other high crimes by the regular tribunals of 
the country. I have quoted some of the short- 
est instances I could find, passing over scores of 
cases nearly as absurd. Several of those enu- 
merated in the list, were of persons who were 
killed by mobs, for which the Hungarian gov- 
ernment was no more responsible than the Eng- 
lish government was for the assault on Haynau. 
Others were cases of murder, by individuals 
which had nothing to do with politics; and in one 
instance an officer was classed among the " mur- 
dered," because he was shot at and killed by the 
Hungarian skirmishers while marching in the 
Austrian ranks (!) A Captain Ottstadt was put in 
the same comprehensive category, because, hav- 
ing been taken prisoner by the Hungarians and 
released by the Austrians — "he died of cholera 
24 hours after his return to his home" ! And 
from such a document as this, Mr. Bowen culls 
two pages of extracts to blast the reputation of 



a gallant and unfortunate people, guilty of no 
crime but that of struggling manfully for free- 
dom and liberal institutions, against the com- 
bined despots of Austria and Russia. 

It would be tedious and superfluous for me to 
examine separately every quotation on Mr. 
Bowen's thirty pages, or to criticise each of his 
twenty " authorities," with regard to most of 
which he prudently abstains from committing 
himself by vouching for their value, except by 
the general assertion that they are "reputable 
and unimpeached witnesses," in which state- 
ment he includes the anonymous pamphleteer 
"Corvinus," and the "official List" of Mag- 
yar atrocities. The writers whom Mr. Bowen 
specially endorses, either in the North American 
or in his letters to the Daily Advertiser, are 
Schlesinger, Pulszky, Paget, McCulloch, and 
De Langsdorff. I shall confine my examination 
therefore, to the quotations from these five wri- 
ters, though the manner in which they are dealt 
with may serve as an index to the treatment of 
the rest. 

Schlesinger is a Hungarian by birth, who has 
long resided in Berlin, and who has written in 
German a history of the war in Hungary. The 
English translation of this, from which Mr. 
Bowen quotes, was edited by Francis Pulszky, 
ex-Secretary of State to Ferdinand, king of 
Hungary, the late Emperor of Austria. Pulszky 
is a man of high character and ability, thorough- 
ly conversant with Hungarian affairs, and to 
Schlesinger' s work prefixed a valuable introduc- 
tion, and added several notes, correcting the oc- 
casional inaccuracies of the text. Mr. Bowen's 
first quotation from Schlesinger is the following. 
[N. A. Review, Jan. 1851, p. 212.] 

" The Magyar movement is widely distin- 
guished, both by the power which called it forth 
and the object it had in view, from all the revo- 
lutions that convulsed Europe during the last 
two years. The political knowledge of the Mag- 
yars does not extend much beyond that of their 
own constitution ; and it is remarkable with 
what singular affection and constancy this an- 
cient constitution, with all its defects and ab- 
normities, has been held fast and cherished by 
the people. Whilst all the other nations have 
sought to enlarge more or less their representa- 
tive constitutions, the Magyar has dreaded any 
change in his, clinging to its very letter, as the 
Mussulman to the words of the Koran." 

Mr. Bowen's purpose in quoting this, was 
evidently to make it appear that the Magyars 
were clinging with stupid bigotry to an old and 
defective constitution, simply because it was old, 
— and in fact, the passage, as he has quoted it, 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



27 



offers no other interpretation. But how far 
such a construction would be from that intended 
by Schlesinger, will be seen by reading the con- 
tinuation of Mr. Bowen's quotation, which is as 
follows: [Vol. 1, p. 114.] 

" The cause of this lies, not so much in a 
belief of its excellence, as in the long struggles 
of the Constitutional principle against the abso- 
lutist efforts of the Vienna Cabinet; to oppose 
which 'the Magyars, in their Diet at Presburg, 
had no more effective weapon than the letter of 
their Constitution, ratified, as it has been, by the 
coronation-oath of every successive king. In 
this policy, the opposite parties in the Diet were 
agreed ; indeed, for a long time past, it had been 
the safest, nay, the only possible course. The 
liberal Hungarian did not cling to his ancient 
Constitution as the free citizen of the United 
States does to his, from a conviction of its excel- 
lence, but because he knew that the concession 
of any single point would strengthen the absolu- 
tist government in Vienna." 

The following is more elaborately mangled. 
It is from vol. II. pp. 88-9 of Schlesinger, and 
may be seen as quoted, on p. 232 of the N. A. 
Review. 

" A far greater error, which must be laid to 
the charge of the Governor and his Ministers 
was the misapprehension of their task in refer- 
ence to the question of nationalities. The De- 
claration cf Independence had no meaning, un- 
less the perfect satisfaction of all the wishes of 
the Croats, Serbs and Wallachs, followed im- 
mediately. The separation of Hungary from 
Austria ought at the same time to be a bond of 
union with the South Sclavish races. That this 
was not easy of accomplishment, must be admit- 
ted ; indeed it was extremely difficult to enter 
into any kind of peaceable and conciliatory 
relations with those nations. [Austria, more- 
over, had cunningly prevented this, by placing its 
creatures at the head of the hostile races. It had 
always been impossible to enter into negotiations 
with these men ; Jcllachich, Raiachich, Supli- 
cacz, Theodorovich, and the rest had received far 
too decided orders, far too brilliant promises to allow 
this. But seeing that an understanding with 
the leaders of the Sclaves was impossible, — and 
knowing that numerous voices among these races 
were beginning to raise the question of an alliance 
with Hungary] — the Government ought, [for 
this very reason] to have disarmed the power of 
the leaders, by issuing a proclamation, and at 
once conceding all the demands of the Hunga- 
rian Sclaves, however exaggerated. No attempt 
ou»ht to have been made to negotiate vith the 
leaders, but the Diet should have addressed 
themselves directly with this explanation to the 
people. By such a step, the Declaration of In- 
dependence would have gained in significance 
and grandeur." 

The sentences between brackets were omitted 
by Mr. Bowcn, for very obvious reasons ; — they 
stated the well-known truth, which he desired 
to suppress, that the opposition to the Hunga- 



rians which existed among a portion of the Scla- 
vonic and Wallachian races, was fomented by 
Austria, whose creatures, Jellachich, Raiachich, 
&c, had been placed at the head of those races 
for that very purpose. 

The next quotation from Schlesinger which I 
shall notice is fortunately a short one. [N. A. 
R. p. 217.] 

"The Hungarian revolution comprehended 
all the elements of success — great statesmen, 
great generals, a great nation, and a country 
favorable to their arms. In the first French 
revolution the people had taken up arms against 
the king; here (at the commencement at least,) 
a nation had risen in support of their king. [The 
object was the same — freedom and indepen- 
dence : but in France the people were unsup- 
ported by the aristocracy, in Poland the aristoc- 
racy Avere unsupported by the people — here 
they both fought together."] Vol. II., p. 223. 

The portion which I have enclosed in brack- 
ets was omitted by Mr. Bowen, because it con- 
flicted with his assertion that the Hungarian 
war was not a war for freedom and independence; 
and with his assertion that it was a struggle of 
the aristocracy to keep the people down; whereas 
Schlesinger, who is by far the best authority 
that Mr. Bowen quotes, says expressly, that un- 
like the case of Poland, the people and the aris- 
tocracy of Hungary fought together against the 
Austrians. Schlesinger's statement, that the 
Hungarian nation at the commencement rose in 
support of their king, alludes to the fact that 
the war began with Jellachich/s invasion of 
Hungary, under secret orders from the Emperor- 
king, who, when interrogated by the Hunga- 
rians, denied that he had given such orders, and 
proclaimed Jellachich a traitor, upon which the 
Hungarians took arms in the name of the king, 
and drove Jcllachich out of the country. 

The next quotation from Schlesinger is equally 
decisive of Mr. Bowen's unfairness. [N. A. R. 
p. 231] : 

" [The Hungarian Envoys at all the Courts 
started from the principle that, in their position 
they had only to deal with the existing Govern- 
ment ; and Teleki always stood aloof from the 
parties in France, who were either at the helm 
of affairs or contending for power. This alone 
can explain the fact, that the Count was well 
received by all the successive ministries. His 
official notes were received, but their efficacy 
was crippled, the reactionary party having gained 
the upper hand, and] the French statesmen, un- 
der pretext of a dread of socialism, considering 
France not in a position to intervene. This 
party, under Lamartine, had already exerted 
their influence against Hungary, and the conse- 
quence was, that Pascal Duprat, who had in 
fact received his instructions from Bastidc, as 



28 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



agent in that country, did not leave France. In 
June, 1819, the affairs of Hungary took a better 
turn In the Elysee and the hotels of the minis- 
ters ; but the overthrow of the party of the 
Mountain again destroyed all that the emphatic 
manifestations of public opinion had effected in 
favor of Hungary. The very circumstance that 
the socialists had taken part for Hungary was 
sufficient to determine the Conservatives against 
it. [ The Moderate party, and especially Mauguin, 
lost no opportunity of expressing their sympathy ; 
but at the same time they would not hear of an 
intervention, from a dread of the Rouge party. 
The French Government, however, again sum- 
moned resolution, when the affairs of Hungary 
were prosperous, to send an agent to that coun- 
try, as well as to protest energetically against 
Russian intervention."] Vol. II. p. 59. 

The passages within brackets were suppress- 
ed by Mr. Bowen, apparently in the hope that 
some careless reader might suppose that the 
portion quoted sustained his ridiculous charge 
of Socialism and Red Republicanism against 
the Hungarians. Schlesinger's meaning was, 
that the French statesmen refused to interfere 
in favor of the Hungarians, not from want of 
sympathy, but because all their energies were 
required at home to keep down the Socialist 
party, which they had just overthrown, and 
which was yet very formidable. From that 
part which Mr. Bowen judiciously declined to 
quote, it will be seen that the Hungarian en- 
voy, Count Tcleki, so far from intriguing with 
or courting the Socialists, stood aloof from all 
parties, and was well received by all the suc- 
cessive Ministries. The Conservatives, of whom 
Schlesinger speaks, were the Royalists ; but the 
Moderate party, which was Republican, though 
opposed to the Socialists, lost no opportunity 
of expressing their sympathy with Hungary. In 
fact, Schlesinger's true meaning was just the 
reverse of the apparent meaning of the passage 
which Mr. Bowen disingenuously tore from its 
context. 

The last of Mr. Bowen's quotations from 
Schlesinger which I shall notice, is so long that 
I shall copy only the material portions of it, 
omitting some irrelevant passages about Geor- 
gey. — [N. A. Review, pp. 234-5. J 

" The Parliament held secret conferences, to 
discuss the great question how the hostile Scla- 
vish and Wallachian races might be won over 
to the Magyar cause. The result was * * * 
a declaration of the equal rights of all national- 
ities, and an amnesty to all who had borne arms 
against Hungary, [28th July, 1849.] * * * 
But the recognition of equal rights came a year too 
late, for it now merely offered to the Sclavish 
races a concession which had already been se- 
cured to them by the Emperor of Austria, and 
offered it moreover in the sight of their burnt 



down cities, desolated villages, and desecrated 
graves." 

To the sentence I have italicized, M. Pulszky 
affixed a note, saying that it was 

"Incorrect; all the inhabitants of Hungary 
had, since March, 1848, possessed equal rights ; 
the Diet only gave an amnesty for the Wal- 
lachs, Saxons, and Serbs, who were at this time 
all subdued by the Hungarians." 

This note Mr. Bowen omitted, making no 
allusion whatever to it, and copied the incorrect 
statement in the text, because it served his pur- 
poses to have it appear that the Magyars had 
granted equal rights to the other races only in 
July, 1849, a few weeks before the war ended, 
when he must have known that, as Pulszky 
stated, all the inhabitants of Hungary had, since 
March, 1848, possessed equal rights. On page 
234 of the N. A. Review is another quotation 
from Schlesinger, too long for me to copy, to 
which Pulszky affixed a note containing an im- 
portant correction, which Mr. Bowen silently 
omits. 

From Pulszky' s preface to the Village No- 
tary, by Baron Eotvos, Mr. Bowen quotes two 
or three paragraphs which he garbles in several 
instances by omitting passages unfavorable to 
A ustria. I will copy the shortest instance. 

" Baron Eotvos was the leader of a third 
party. He was imbued with the levelling ten- 
dencies of French liberalism. The men of 
Eotvos' school admired the theoretical perfec- 
tion of Centralization, and vied with the Vienna 
party in their aversion to the county institu- 
tions, with their assemblies and elections. [But 
the Austrian Camarilla wished to establish the 
so-called ' Paternal Absolutism,' in the place of the 
county institutions ; while the Eotvos party 
dreamed of a free parliamentary government.] 
His party considered Hungary as a tabula rasa, 
and they endeavored in defiance of history to 
raise a new political fabric," &c. 

The passage within brackets Mr. Bowen sup- 
presses. 

Mr. Bowen's quotations from Paget are not 
any fairer than those from Schlesinger. The 
following is from the second volume of " Hun- 
gary and Transylvania," pp. 229-300, Am. ed. 
[N. A. R. p. 213.] 

[ " There seems, too, to be some idea among 
the tttes exalttes here, of an Illyrian nationality.] 
It is no uncommon thing to hear them reckon- 
ing up the Croats, Sclavonians, Bosnians, Dal- 
matians, Servians, Montenegrins, and Bulgari- 
ans, and then comparing this mass of Sclaves 
with the three or four millions of Magyars, and 
proudly asking why they should submit to deny 
their language and their origin because the 
Magyars command it. I am very far from wish- 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



29 



ing this party success, though I cannot help in 
some degree sympathizing with a people who 
resist, when they think a stronger power is 
willing to abuse its strength by depriving the 
weaker of those objects — language and religion 
— which they hold as most dear. [No one can 
doubt how highly conducive it would be to the 
good of Hungary that Croatia should be made 
completely Hungarian ; or that it is disgraceful 
to the age in which we live, that Protestants 
should be excluded from a whole country on 
account of their faith ; yet indubitable as are 
these facts, it may nevertheless be very impoli- 
tic to seek to remedy them by violent means.] 
The act has passed, however, which declares 
that in ten years' time no Croat shall be eligible 
to a public office who cannot read and write the 
^Magyar language, and the consequence has 
Hbeen, the creation of a feeling of hatred against 
the Magyars, which bodes but very ill for the 
speedy Magyarizing of the Croatian people, — 
[I have no doubt thft some portion of this op- 
position is connected with Russian intrigue ; 
for it is particularly strong among members of 
the Greek church, and it is so much the inter- 
est of Russia to weaken Austria, by disorganiz- 
ing her ill-united parts, that we may be sure 
such an opportunity for- the attainment of her 
object would not be lost."] 

The passages within brackets were omitted 
by Mr. Bowen. That at the beginning and that 
at the end are not of much importance ; yet 
they should have been quoted — the first as 
showing that the boasts about the numbers of 
the Croats, Sclavonians, &c, were not uttered 
by the people generally, but by the tttes exalUes 
of the small town of Agram, which Mr. Paget 
was then visiting ; and the last, as expressing 
his opinion that this feeling of hostility to the 
Magyars was not altogether owing to the acts 
of the Hungarian Diet, but was in part pro- 
duced by Russian intrigue. The passage in the 
middle, which Mr. Bowen suppressed, w r as, 
however, of essential importance ; for in it Mr. 
Paget clearly expresses his opinion that it would 
be highly conducive to the good of Hungary, 
tb - '- Croatia should be made completely Hunga- 
rian. By Hungary, he means to include Croatia 
itself, which for eight centuries, has been a part 
of that country. Its peasantry spoke a dialect of 
their own,which till within a few years, had been 
wholly uncultivated ; so that when Paget wrote, 
there were but three or four books in it. The 
people who spoke this dialect numbered only a 
few hundred thousands, and, of course, it was 
as desirable that the principal language of the 
country, the Magyar, which was spoken by 
millions, should prevail, as that that the Eng- 
lish should prevail over the French in Louisi- 
ana, or over the German in Pennsylvania. The 
allusion to the exclusion of Protestants from 
Croatia is also very important, and I do not won- 

3* 



der that Mr. Bowen was unwilling to quote it. 
It will be understood by the following passage 
frcm the same chapter of Paget, [vol. ii. pp. 
296-7, Am. ed.], from which Mr. Bowcn's ex- 
tract was taken. 

" Crotia and Sclavonia have the same lazes and 
Constitution as the rest of Hungary, except in one 
or two particulars, in which they enjoy special priv- 
ileges. * * * * A case has lately arisen 
with respect to one of these privileges, which 
has given it a very unenviable notoriety. It is 
the privilege of excluding all Protestants from the 
2)Ossession of property, and I believe of refusing 
them even the right of living within the boundaries 
of the two countries. This question has been 
mooted before the General Diet, and a more 
tolerant law passed ; but as yet no change has 
been effected , for the Croatians have refused to 
sanction or adopt it." 

This is very significant. More than one-half 
of the Magyars are Protestants, nobles as well 
as peasants, and indeed Protestantism is known 
in Hungary as the Magyar religion. Yet Croa- 
tia and Sclavonia had the privilege of excluding 
all Protestants, Magyars as well as others, from 
holding property or even from residing there ; 
and when the General Diet of Hungary, the 
Magyar Diet, as Mr. Bowen delights to call it, 
passed a more tolerant law, it was nullified by 
the bigoted Croatians ! This single fact is suffi- 
cient to refute Mr. Bowen's repeated assertions 
that the Magyars domineered over and oppress- 
ed the Croatians and Sclavonians, and that the 
late war was commenced for the purpose of 
keeping the latter races in subjection. It is in 
fact sufficient to explode his whole position on 
the subject of Hungary, and, I repeat, that I do 
not wonder that he was unwilling to quote it. 

I will copy one more of Mr. Bowen's quota- 
tions from Paget, [N. A. R., pp. 228-9.] 

"One of the fundamental laws of the Saxons 
(Germans) is the equality of every individual 
of the Saxon nation. They have no nobles, no 
peasants. Not but that many of the Saxons 
have received letters of Nobility, and deck 
themselves out in all its plumes ; yet as every 
true Saxon will tell you, that is only as Hunga- 
rian nobles, not as Saxons. Their municipal 
government was entirely in their own hands ; 
every village chose its own officers, and man- 
aged its own affairs, without the interference 
of any higher power. [A few years ago, how- 
ever, a great and arbitrary change was made in 
this institution, which though it almost escaped 
notice at the time, has since excited the most 
bitter complaint. The whole of this transaction 
was managed without the consent cither of the 
Diet or the Saxon nation. Its effects have been 
to deprive the Saxon communities of the free 
exercise of their privileges, and to deliver them 
into the power of a corrupt bureaucracy, over 
which they have little or no control."] — [Vol. k., 
pp. 211-12, Am. cd.] 



30 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



Mr. Bovren omitted the latter portion of the 
quotation, I suppose, because it showed that 
the condition of the Saxons, as described in the 
first portion, had been changed even before Mr. 
Paget' s visit to them, which was about fifteen 
years ago, and changed, too, not by the Magyars, 
but by the arbitrary act of the Austrian Govern- 
ment. Mr. Paget, on the same page, relates 
that Magyar and Saxon deputies went together 
to Vienna, to remonstrate with the Emperor 
against these proceedings. 

Among his thirty pages of citations, Mr. 
Bo wen has one from McCulloch's Universal 
Gazetteer, or Geographical Dictionary, which 
through inadvertence, I presume, he cites as 
McCulloch's " Com. Gaz.," Mr. McCulloch be- 
ing the author of a Commercial Dictionary. 
In examining the Eight Points of his rejoinder 
to Mrs. Putnam, I had occasion to expose the 
mode in which he had quoted from this same 
Avork of McCulloch's. The following speci- 
men will be found equally remarkable. 

" The internal government of the nation is a 
mixed monarchy and aristocracy. Laws can 
only be enacted by the joint consent of the 
King and the Diet ; and although the executive 
power be said to lie with the King, yet the sov- 
ereign has only the nomination of Lords Lieu- 
tenant (obergespanne) of counties, and adminis- 
trators ; since every other public officer is either 
elected by the county itself, or named by its 
Lord Lieutenant — a nomination, however, which 
is often successfully disputed. * * * • * * 
Under the kings of the reigning house, a great 
portion of Hungary and of the annexed districts 
was conquered from the Turks by great exertion 
on the part of the other imperial States ; and 
many important alterations, in the relations of 
the King and the estates took place at different 
times. What are called the cardinal privileges 
of the nobility and clergy, who are looked upon 
as equal to the nobility, have been preserved to 
the present day, to an extent unparalleled in 
any country in Europe. * •; ' * * * * The 
nobles being mostly Magyars, it follows that the 
Magyar nation has been chiefly instrumental in 
maintaining the constitution during so many 
centuries." — [McCulloch's Com. Gaz., (New 
York Ed.), 1S45, pp. 1142-1144.] 

I have copied the whole extract, even to a 
comma, exactly as it stands in the North Amer- 
ican Review, Jan., 1851, pp. 208-9. The reader 
will notice that apparently the whole passage is 
in McCulloch's own language, Mr. Bowen giv- 
ing no indication that it is not. He will notice 
also that it is stated towards the close of the 
quotation, that the privileges of the nobility 
have been preserved to the present day, to an 
extent unparalleled in any country in Europe, 
and that the only date given in connection with 



the extract is 1845. My copy of McCulloch is 
of the same edition as that which Mr. Bowen 
uses— the New York edition, published by the 
Harpers. On turning to it, I find that the last 
clause of Mr. Bowen's quotation, " The nobles 
being mostly Magyars," &c, consisting of three 
lines, is taken from the section on the Finances 
of Hungary, on p. 1144— the rest of the quota- 
tion being extracted from the section on the 
Constitution, pp. 1142-1143. I find also that 
not a word of the quotation, except the three 
lines from the section on the Finances, is 
McCulloch's own language, but on the con- 
trary, is from an Austrian document which 
McCulloch puts in quotation marks, and which 
he introduces in this manner : 

" The following account of the Hungarian 
constitution is given in the official report drawn 
up for the use of the Emperor's Cabinet, by 
Baron de Baldacci, and may be looked upon as 
a declaration of the rights of the nation on the 
part of the crown." 

When it is known that the Hungarians, at 
the date of that document, were engaged in a 
contest with their king, on the subject of their 
rights, precisely similar to that which the Eng- 
lish House of Commons maintained so long 
against the Stuarts, the significance of the 
phrase I have italicized, on the part of the crown, 
will be evident enough ; and evident enough 
also will be the injustice of quoting against the 
Hungarians such a document, and passing it 
off as the statement of the impartial and intel- 
ligent McCulloch. Mr. Bowen might, with as 
much propriety, copy one of Hallam's quota- 
tions from the manifestoes of Charles L, and 
offer it to his readers as that historian's state- 
ment of what the constitution of England really 
was in the early part of the seventeenth century. 
But the injustice of the quotation will be made 
still more manifest by the following passage from 
McCulloch's own pen, which immediately fol- 
lows the last words of Mr. Bowen's quotation : 
" in any country in Europe." 

" Such were the claims asserted and the priv- 
ileges allowed by the King of Hungary in 1831. 
That the political privileges of the nobles have 
been maintained, should, perhaps, be matter 
of rejoicing, when the services they have recently 
conferred on their countrymen are taken into ac- 
count ; and still more, when they have been 
the means of preserving what will no doubt 
become, in the end, a really free system of gov- 
ernment. At present [1840], except the right 
of election, which is vested in the 267,300 no- 
bles, there is no political privilege which the loioest 
Hungarian does not enjoy in common with the 
inhabitants of the other constitutional States 
of Europe." 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



31 



Now, why did Mr. Bowen suppress the above 
passage, and especially the date of 1831? He 
knew, for he had repeatedly admitted the fact 
in his articles, that immense changes were ef- 
fected in the condition of Hungary, in the years 
that immediately succeeded 1831. Or if he had 
forgotten his own statements, he could not have 
failed to be reminded of the fact by McCulloch, 
whose article on Hungary he seems to have 
ransacked for scraps which, when detached 
from their proper connection, would apparently 
serve his purposes. I will quote some of the 
passages I refer to, which it is impossible Mr. 
Bowen could have overlooked, and to which he 
makes not the slightest allusion. 

" Of late years, the higher classes have been 
laudably active in endeavoring to ameliorate 
the condition of the lower orders, by the foun- 
dation of schools, the distribution of useful 
works, attention to the state of prisons, &c. ; 
and their private beneficence has been effectu- 
ally aided by the grand legislative measure 
of 1836, which so much extended the civil 
rights of the peasants. By the act of the Diet 
of that year, called the ' Urbarium,' the nobles 
gave up in principle two of the most obnoxious 
privileges of their order — freedom from taxation, 
and the right of being judges in their own 
causes in manorial courts. The exemption 
from taxation was waived, not by a voluntary 
acceptance of burdens, which would have oc- 
casioned a vast revolution in property, and en- 
dangered one of the most valuable advantages 
of the Hungarian constitution ; but by the 
enactment that if a noble purchased a peasant's 
holding liable to taxation, the noble should 
continue to pay the impost. In some respects, 
the lords were placed in a disadvantageous position 
by the new law, as the peasants may leave, sell, 
or transfer their holdings at will ; whereas, the 
lord has no power over them, except that of execu- 
tion for rent. * * * * To this decree of 
the Diet, tohich, as a voluntary act of self-renun- 
ciation by the nobles, has no parallel in the annals 
of any other nation, other measures have since 
been added of scarcely less importance. A de- 
cree of the Diet of 1839 secures to the peasant 
the right of disposing by will of all kinds of 
property. In 1840, the Diet passed a bill de- 
claring Catholics and Protestants to stand upon 
an equal footing in contracts of marriage, neither 
confession being suffered to impose restraints 
upon the other, and admitting Jews to equal 
rights with other commoners throughout the 
kingdom." Pp. 113S-39. 

These were McCulloch's statements in 1840, 
of the condition of Hungary, and of the char- 
acter of her nobility ; as patriotic a race of men 
as ever existed, according to the testimony of 
all writers on the subject except Mr. Bowen. 
De Langsdorff, another of Mr. Bowen's authori- 
ties, speaking of the act of the Diet of 183G, 
says : 

" This was the first breach made in the privi- 



leges of the nobility ; and it was by the nobility 
that it was made. There, where I felt only a 
sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacrificing 
their interests without hesitation, found the op- 
portunity to repair a long injustice. Since that 
time, the Hungarian nobles have walked reso- 
lutely in that path ; it is they who for twenty 
years have been laboring to file the chains of 
their subjects ; it is they who, in a solemn day, 
have willed to break them forever. — Revue cles 
Deux Mondes, August 1, 1848, p. 402. 

The solemn day to which M. de Langsdorff 
alludes, was in March, 1848, when the last ves- 
tiges of " feudalism " were swept away by the 
Hungarian Diet, and -equal rights granted to all 
the inhabitants of Hungary, without distinction 
of race or birth. Another of Mr. Bowen's au- 
thorities, and a highly respectable one, M. De- 
gerando, said in 1845, in a passage quoted in 
the N. A. Review, April, 1850, p. 329 ; 

"To the Hungarian nobility belongs the 
honor of having been the first to propose all 
these new laws. Under the eyes of a retrograde 
government, they are accomplishing a task, be- 
fore which the aristocracies of every other 
country have shrunk back. They prepare the 
reign of equality, before the people for whose 
good they labor have yet thought of raising; 
their voice. * * * * Not only does this 
aristocracy accord the rights granted to the in- 
ferior classes, but it also despoils itself of the 
privileges that it has possessed for ten centu- 
ries ; it offers spontaneously to pay imposts to 
which it has never been subjected, and breaks 
of itself the last barrier which separates it from 
the people." 

Mr. Bowen himself, in his Peview T for Janu- 
ary and April, 1850, admitted, though as re- 
luctantly and as obscurely as he could express 
it, that " for twenty years preceding the recent 
war," beneficial changes had been going on 
[p. 106] ; that each successive Diet, during that 
period, passed new measures of reform [pp. 107, 
516]; that, after 1843, only a single question 
remained to be settled [p. 516]; and that this 
question was settled in 1848 [p. 517] when 
"the work of social reform" was finished — re- 
luctantly indeed, but still finished— by Kos- 
suth's ministry [p. 516]. The Hungarian no- 
bility relinquished the last of their exclusive 
privileges in March, 1848. In October, 1848, 
seven months afterwards, the war with Austria 
began.. And now in the face of his authorities 
and in the face of his own admissions, let us 
listen to Mr. Bowen's deliberate summing up 
of his statements about Hungary in the North 
American Be view for Jan., 1851. [pp. 238-9.] 

" Since the fall of the aristocracies of Venice 
and Poland, the Magyars in Hungary, with few 
exceptions, have been the most arrogant, cruel 
and tyrannical nobility in Europe. The robber 



32 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



barons of the middle ages did not more fully 
merit the vengeance which sometimes overtook 
them at the hands of their despairing vassals, 
than did these semi-barbarous nobles the ruin 
which h?s at length befallen them. They have 
kept their country three centuries behind the 
age, for the sole purpose of retaining their odi- 
ous privileges as an order and a race. The 
policy even of Austrian despotism was liberal 
and enlightened, compared with theirs. They 
were the firmest supporters, the pliant instru- 
ments and vassals of that despotism, so long as 
it would aid them in riveting the chains upon 
their unhappy subjects. When that aid was 
withdrawn, they turned fiercely against the 
power to which they had so long submitted 
without a murmur, and at the same moment 
found themselves surrounded, as with a wall 
of fire, by their revolted and desperate vassals. 
Slowacks and Wallachians, Servians, Germans, 
and Croatians, races separated from each other 
by the widest differences of languages, manners 
and religion, were now united by a common 
hatred of the Magyars, and fought against them 
with a long restrained thirst for vengeance, and 
with all the energy of despair." 

What an extraordinary people these Magyars 
must be— according to Mr. Bowen. First, they 
labored for twenty years to effect measures of 
reform by which all their peculiar privileges 
were given up, and by which they placed them- 
selves on a perfect political equality with the 
other races ; — and then, seven months after they 
had thus voluntarily relinquished the last of 
their privileges, " they turned fiercely against" 
Austria because it would not " aid them in 
riveting the chains upon their unhappy sub- 
jects " — " their revolted and desperate vassals "! 
It is possible, however, that these inconsisten- 
cies may really exist, not in the conduct of the 
Magyars, but in the memory of Mr. Bowen, 
of the peculiar shortness of which, abundant 
evidence was exhibited by Mrs. Putnam in the 
Christian Examiner. The following is one of 
the instances which she cites. In the North 
American Review for January, 1851, p. 221, 
speaking of the proclamation by which Jella- 
chich, Ban of Croatia, was deprived of his office, 
which proclamation Mr. Bowen maintained to 
be a forgery, he said — " Towards the close of it 
allusion is made to the fact that the emperor 
had summoned Jellachich to come before him 
and defend his conduct, which summons, it is 
foolishly alleged, he had refused to obey. * * * 
Now, it is notorious that he did appear before 
the emperor at Innspruck, in June, as sum- 
moned." Here, Mr. Bowen, to show the falsity 
and absurdity of a document which does not 
please him, says that it "foolishly alleges " that 
Jellachich had "refused to obey 7 ' the emperor's 
summons, when "it is notorious" that he did 



iobey, Now, Mr. Bowen himself, just twelve 
. months before, had made the very same state- 
ment which he here condemns as having been 
"foolishly alleged," and had himself denied 
this "notorious" interview! In the N. A. 
Review for January, 1850, p. 124, he said : 

" The emperor, who, in the middle of May, 
had secretly left his capital and taken refuge at 
Innspruck, temporized at first; but as the conduct 
of the Czechs at Prague grew more outrageous, 
he became more hostile to the Sclavonian cause, 
and summoned the Ban to meet him in the 
Tyrol, and to give an account of his conduct. 
Jellachich not only refused, but attended the 
Sclavonian Diet, which he had called at Agram, 
where he was formally elected Ban by that 
assembly, having hitherto held his office by im- 
perial appointment. The emperor then denounced 
him as a rebel, and ordered him; to be deprived of 
all his offices and titles." 

Mr. Bowen's articles on Hungary abound in 
inconsistencies of this kind, for it is only by such 
inconsistencies that the facts which he encoun- 
ters in the course of his argument could be made 
to bend in accommodation to his theories. Mrs. 
Putnam's exposure of them will well repay 
perusal not only by its extraordinary learning, 
but as one of the best instances in our literature 
of candid, sagacious and triumphant criticism. 

In closing this review of the articles of Mr. 
Bowen, I can honestly say that I have not half ex- 
hausted the record of his perversions, plagiarisms 
and falsifications. To expose them all would, in 
fact, require a considerable volume, for Mrs. 
Putnam's assertion that " there is hardly a sen- 
tence in his principal article in which an. error 
is not either expressed or implied," is literally 
true. I do not believe that there can be found 
elsewhere in the English language in the same 
compass, so many blunders, so many falsehoods, 
so much literary dishonesty. Yet it was with a 
consciousness of these crimes against the truth, 
that Mr. Bowen put on an air of righteous indig- 
nation, and charged Mrs. Putnam with false- 
hood, and with having " deliberately forged his- 
torical statements, in order to damage his repu- 
tation and deprive him of office." No wonder 
such words were so ready to his lips, when the 
things they signify were so familiar to his mind. 



MR. BOWEN S DEFENCE OF HIS ARTICLES. 

The greater part of the foregoing remarks on 
Mr. Bowen's articles appeared in the Boston 
Atlas, last winter. My last communication was 
handed to the editors of that paper on Jaa. 25, 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



33 



1851, but did not appear till February 3. On 
February 6, the overseers of Harvard University 
were to meet for the purpose, among other 
things, of confirming or rejecting Mr. Bowen's 
appointment to the Professorship of History 
which he had held for some months. On the 
morning of that day, a letter from Mr. Bowento 
the editors of the Atlas, appeared in that paper 
as a reply to my criticisms. It may be supposed 
to contain all that Mr. Bowen had to say in de- 
fence of himself, and in justice to him, 1 shall 
republish it entire, with the exception of a few 
portions of a merely personal nature, and of a 
long appeal to the newspapers to let him alone 
for the future, so far as the war in Hungary is 
concerned. 

I have indicated by figures some passages, 
remarks on which will be found below. 
To the Editors of the Atlas : 

Gentlemen : — As you have devoted twelve or 
fourteen columns of your paper, within the last 
few weeks, to severe comments upon my conduct 
and writings, I will ask the favor of you to give 
me about one-tenth part as much space for a few 
remarks in reply. 

Little more than a year ago, I published an 
article, in which, while severely censuring the 
conduct and policy of Austria, I advocated to 
the best of my ability the cause of the Hunga- 
rian " subject races," of Slavonian, Wallachian, 
and German descent — about eight millions in 
number, who had recently broken their chains 
and risen up fiercely against half a million of 
Magyar nobles, who had held them in servitude 
for nearly eight centuries, and had recently 
crowned, their highly oppressive treatment of 
them by making it penal for them to speak their 
own language. This article gave great offence 
to a few Magyar and Polish nobles resident in 
this country ; and through some penny newspa- 
pers (1) they published such bold denials of the 
truth of history in regard to it, and such scur- 
rilous attacks upon the character of its author, 
that I was obliged to write a second article, (in 
April, 1850,) in which the testimony adduced 
in support of the allegations contained in the 
former one, was so complete and satisfactory that 
no doubt remained upon the minds of intelligent 
persons, and no further attempt was made for 
seven months to convict me of holding anti-re- 
publican sentiments, or the N. A. Review of 
making historical blunders. (2) But within the 
last three months, these attempts have been 
renewed with so much acrimony, and carried on 
to so great an extent, that I have been again 
forced to break silence, though very reluctantly, 
and to produce still more testimony against the 
cause of the Magyar aristocrats, and in favor of 
their insurgent, and now triumphant subjects, 
their former serfs and slaves. This I did in two 
letters to the Boston Daily Advertiser, and in an 
article in the N. A. Review for January last. In 
the latter, I summoned into court a cro w d of wit- 
nesses, English, French, German, and Hunga- 
rian, professing all forms of political doctrine, 



whose united and harmonious testimony can 
leave no doubt upon a mind of ordinary capa- 
city, however unwelcome the truth may be, or 
how obstinate soever the bias by which its re- 
ception at an earlier day was prevented. The 
article is little more than a string of citations 
from authorities which few will be hardy enough 
to dispute. By arranging and linking together 
these extracts, I merely told the story of the 
civil war in Hungary over again, only using the 
language of a crowd of reputable and unim- 
peached witnesses, instead of my own ; and it 
may safely be left to the reader to decide which 
form of the statement is more injurious to the 
Magyars. 

Some of these witnesses were Magyars, and 
their testimony was, consequently, of great 
weight. The explicit admissions of an opponent, 
every one knows, form the most valuable and 
unimpeachable kind of evidence. Schlesinger 
was the chief witness of this class. (3) When 
his testimony was first adduced, in my first 
letter to the Advertiser, I said, speaking of his 
book : " Of course the work contains many extrava- 
gant assertions and perversions of fact, designed 
to procure sympathy for the Magyars in other 
lands ; but as the book was designed for circu- 
lation in Germany and England, it also contains 
many admissions and frank acknowledgments 
which are not calculated to favor that cause in 
Republican America. Want of space obliges 
me to restrict my citations from it ; but enough 
may be gleaned to confirm my general position 
that the war in Austria teas a war of races, first 
waged among the Hungarians themselves, and 
not a revolt of the whole nation against Aus- 
tria." 

And, to "prevent all caviling," in a note to 
the article in the Review, I added : "To save 
space, Ave have been obliged to make the ex- 
tracts as brief as possible ; but the omissions are 
indicated, and tlie exact references to the volumes 
and pages will enable any reader to verify them 
with little difficulty. '\i) Yet your correspondent, 
R. C, who has occupied eleven mortal columns 
of your paper with an attempt to answ r er my 
articles, has actually devoted a large portion of 
this large space, — nearly the whole of his last 
communication, — to very superfluotis proof that 
these Magyar waiters, (5) Schlesinger particu- 
larly, make many other assertions, besides those 
which I had cited— these others being very fa- 
vorable to the Magyar cause. Of course they 
did ; no attentive reader of my articles could 
doubt the fact ; the few sentences just quoted 
indicate it very clearly- The fact only strength- 
ens my argument. With all their predilection 
for the Magyar cause, which was their own 
cause ; with all their rash assertions in favor of 
this cause, their candor and love of justice, as 
R. C. would say, compelled thern to make ad- 
missions enough to justify nearly every one of my 
statements, R. C. need not have spent a month, 
as he says he has done, in painful study of my 
articles, and of the authorities to which I refer- 
red him, for the purpose of pointing out omis- 
sions, the places of which I had carefully indi- 
cated throughout ; any reader of common in- 
telligence, with the books at hand, might have 
pci't'ormed Pv, C/s month's work in fifteen min- 



34 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



utes. The volume and the page were given ; 
and asterisks, or some other mark, showed just 
where he was to look for the omitted passage, 
which passage itself proved that it was quite 
irrelevant to the point at issue, viz : that the 
Magyars themselves admitted nearly all that I 
had asserted respecting them. That they also 
said something else, in defending their own 
cause, was a quite irrelevant fact, with which I 
had nothing to do. That they did say such 
other things was a fact which, in general terms, 
I had already communicated to the reader ; and 
I had also told him just where he might find 
them. (6) 

I had also quoted from high official authority, 
accounts of eight brutal judicial murders, com- 
mitted by the Magyar revolutionists, two of the 
victims being priests, and the third a woman sev- 
enty years of age. Without venturing to ques- 
tion one of these statements — nay, seeming to 
admit by implication that these accounts were 
correct, or that they were the best substantiated 
of the lot, R. C. objects that the list from which 
they are taken also contains accounts of many 
other cases, some of which, he thinks, are of 
doubtful authenticity. Very well; I did not 
quote one of these doubtful cases. I cited only 
those about which there appears to be no doubt ; 
for R. C, with all his "learning and ability," 
and a month's study, does not venture to ques- 
tion one of them. Were these unfair citations 
on my part ? (7) 

I am further charged with citing from Mc- 
Culloch's Gazetteer, a statement which McCul- 
loch makes, not on his own unsupported author- 
ity, but on that of Baron Baldacci ; and R. C.'s 
commentary on this important fact would lead 
the careless reader to infer that McCulloch cited 
the passage only for the purpose of confuting 
it. But no such thing ; McCulloch adopts it as 
his own, leaving it to be implied that it was the 
best account of the matter which he could find. 
As his whole work was a professed compilation 
from the highest and latest authorities that he 
could obtain, and as in this case he gives not 
only the name, but the exact words, of his au- 
thority, one would think that the passage was 
suited, above all others, for fair citation. (8) 

The charge of plagiarism that is brought 
against me, by one who admits that five- sixths 
of my article were not borrowed from any 
writer, and that the other sixth, though founded 
on the statements of fact contained in a French 
Review, was so written that not one sentence of it 
was a literal translation from the original, but 
that the whole was a restatement of the facts in 
my own language, — this charge, I say, may be 
quietly put aside without explanation or de- 
fence. Full credit was given in the beginning 
of my article to the French writer for the aid 
that he had rendered. (9} 

As your correspondent was seemingly unwil- 
ling to close so long a communication without 
adducing a particle of new testimony upon the 
subj ect, while I had brought forward a cloud of 
witnesses, he copies, from an old communication 
to the vilest penny newspaper in New York, a 
few sentences of vague denunciation of my arti- 
cle, which he says were written by a well 
known Polish Count, now resident in this coun- 



try. It is quite likely that he did write them ; 
I should be much surprised if one of the Polish 
nobility, who boasts that he held for some years 
an important office in the Russian Ministry, and 
stood high in favor with the Emperor Nicholas, 
— favor which he earned by publishing at Paris, 
in 1834, a harsh attack upon the principles and 
conduct of his own countrymen, who had then 
recently been engaged in their memorable strug- 
gle for freedom, — did not give his suffrage very 
heartily in favor of half a million of Magyar 
nobles, who endeavored to put down a rebellion 
of eight millions of their own hereditary bonds- 
men. Here in America, such testimony is sure 
to be appreciated at its true value. (10) 

As an offset to this remarkable voucher of the 
genuine republicanism of the Magyars, I will 
now cite some testimony that came to me, quite 
unsolicited and unexpected, about two months 
ago. In November last, a gentleman whom I 
had never seen, though his name was familiar 
to me, came to my house, bringing a note from 
one of the most distinguished clergymen in 
Boston, introducing him as " a learned Hunga- 
rian, who, having read your article in the N. A. 
Review, expresses his admiration at the extent 
and accuracy of your acquaintance with the 
history of his country, and with the causes of 
the late revolution." Of Sclavonic descent, 
born and educated in Hungary, which he quit- 
ted for the last time only in January, 1850, and 
having held high academical office, for which 
his acquisitions admirably fitted him, while his 
profession debarred him from taking up arms, 
he seemed qualified above all others in this 
country to form and express a fair and unbiassed 
opinion as to the merits of the respective parties 
to the contest. At the request of several gen- 
tlemen in Boston, he had procured and care- 
fully read my article on the War of Races, and 
the one in reply to it in the last number of the 
Christian Examiner, in order that he might in- 
form them which gave the more faithful and 
trustworthy account of the whole matter. He 
had expressed to them his opinion, without re- 
serve ; and they will doubtless be willing to say 
what that opinion was, if their testimony should 
be needed. The following is what he told me, 
as I reduced it to writing at the time. 

He said, " I thought no one who had not 
been resident at least thirty yeaiss in Hungary, 
could have given as truthful a sketch as yours 
of the nature of the war in that country. It was 
' a war of races ;' it was a rebellion of the long 
down-trodden and oppressed Slavons and Wal- 
lachians against their insolent and cruel mas- 
ters, the Magyars. Not a Slowack peasant join- 
ed the Magyar army, except by compulsion. 
Three of my own brothers were in this predica- 
ment : they were told, ' enlist, or you must die ;' 
they did enlist, and were all killed. Many 
other Slowacks were in this way driven into the 
ranks, but all took the first opportunity to de- 
sert to the Austrians. The Austrian Emperor 
had always, to the full extent of his power, be- 
friended the poor Slavon and Wallachian peas- 
ants, and protected them against the Magyar 
nobles ; the Austrian government was, there- 
fore, very popular among them. After the rev- 
olutions at Vienna and Pesth, the poor peasants 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



35 



were in despair; they were abandoned to the 
dominion and wrath of the Magyars, who could 
now tyrannize over them without restraint. 
They sent one or two deputations to St. Peters- 
burg, to implore help from the Russian Emper- 
or. When the Austrian column, under Gen. 
Schlich, and especially when the Russians of 
Paskiewitsch's army, passed through my own 
town, I saw that they were received with the 
utmost enthusiasm. The common people turned 
out in great numbers, and many of them actu- 
ally kissed the feet of the officers and soldiers, 
as their deliverers. I was, myself, in 1848, 
apprehended in Pesth for some remarks made 
in a coffee-house about the justice of putting 
all four languages on a par, and not forcing the 
Magyar tongue upon those who hated it ; for 
this offence, I was imprisoned three months. 
The Magyars sent commissioners into the Slow- 
ack counties, who, with the aid of the troops, 
acted in the most insolent and barbarous man- 
ner. Kossuth was ennobled because he had re- 
ceived a university education ; his parents were 
peasants. He became Magyarized, as some of 
the poor Slowacks did, who loved office and 
emolument better than their race; for no one 
not Magyarized could expect any preferment. 
They were nobiles Magyarisati, or Magyarized 
nobles. I tell these these things to my own 
detriment and peril, knowing how much the 
sympathy of Americans has been excited on 
false pretences for the Magyars ; but I am a 
minister of Christ, and must tell the truth. 
Here is a copy of the Christian Examiner for 
November, in which you will perceive I have 
underscored very many passages in the Magyar 
article, and put against them a mark signifying 
falsehood ; while at the end of nearly all the 
extracts made in it from your article I have 
written rede." 

So far the Sclovack clergyman. I had not in- 
tended to print his testimony, which has been 
lying in my desk for nearly two months ; for it 
seems to me to be of very little importance, in 
comparison with the positive and complete evi- 
dence from official documents, which I have 
cited in my articles in the Review. But as the 
coarsely expressed opinion of a Polish noble- 
man converted into a Russian Minister of State, 
is so confidently cited in favor of the Magyar 
aristocrats, I now offer the direct testimony of a 
Hungarian clergyman in favor of those poor 
Slavonian peasants whom Count Gurowski treats 
with lofty disdain. Your readers can decide 
which is the more trustworthy witness of the 
two. 

And now, having put my authorities in the 
van, I beg permission to disappear behind them, 
and to hope that the pitiless storm of abuse, 
which has been beating upon me for the last 
fourteen months, may in future be directed 
against such haters of liberty and advocates of 
despotism as Lamartine, Pulszky, Lord Brough- 
am, Rey, Schlesinger, and a dozen others, whese 
evidence I have cited. I fear the poor Slovack 
clergyman now brought forward will get his 
full share of it. (11) 

* * # # * * * 



Francis Bowen. 



Cambridge, Feb. 4, 1851. 



(1) The truthfulness of the impression which 
Mr. Bowen here seeks to convey, that his attack 
on the Hungarians gave offence only to " a few 
Magyar and Polish nobles resident in this coun- 
try," and that the criticisms upon it were made 
" through some penny newspapers," may be 
inferred from the fact that it was criticized edi- 
torially by the Boston Atlas, the Boston Tran- 
script, the New York Tribune, the New York 
Evening Post, the Washington Republic and 
other equally respectable journals. "Whether 
or not their articles were written by Magyar or 
Polish nobles, I have no means of knowing, 
but presume that such was not the case. 

(2) The statement that the testimony in Mr. 
Bowen's second article was " so complete and 
satisfactory that no doubt remained upon the 
minds of intelligent persons," may be true un- 
der a peculiar definition of "intelligent per- 
sons ; " but as Mrs. Putnam expressly states in 
the Christian Examiner that it was this very 
second article which induced her to write her 
reply, and as that reply was written within the 
seven months to which Mr. Bowen refers, it is 
evident that there was an attempt during that 
period " to convict the North American Review 
of making historical blunders." 

(3) " Some of these witnesses were Magyars 
— Schlesinger was the chief witness of this 
class." The writers whom Mr. Bowen was 
charged with garbling or perverting, besides 
Schlesinger, are De Langsdorff, Robertson, 
Coxe, Gibbon, McCulloch, Corvinus, Paget, 
Pulszky and Mrs. Putnam. Of these Pulszky 
is the only Hungarian, and even he is not a 
Magyar. Mrs. Putnam says he is of Slavonic 
descent. Nor is Schlesinger a Magyar. He is 
of German descent and though, born in Hun- 
gary, has for many years resided in Germany, 
chiefly at Berlin. His book was written in 
German and published in Germany. The au- 
thor, in fact, was no way identified with the 
Magyars or their cause. Nor were all the 
other authors whom Mr. Bowen garbled favora- 
ble to the Hungarians. Corvinus and De Langs- 
dorff are decidedly hostile to them, yet in quot- 
ing from even these writers, Mr. Bowen omitted 
all that was favorable to the Magyars, though 
the omission frequently left the quotation in 
such a state that it conveyed a meaning directly 
opposite to that which the writer intended. 

(4) " The omissions are indicated, and the exact 
references to the volumes and pages will enable any 
reader to verify them with little difficulty." This 
" little difficulty " may be understood from the 



36 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



fact that of the ten books whose titles afe pre- 
fixed to Mr. Bowen's last article in the North 
American, seven are in German, and can be ob- 
tained in this country only by sending a special 
order to Europe for them. The three other 
works are in English. Of two of these, I could 
find no copies in Boston or Cambridge and those 
which I at length used were imported expressly 
for the purpose of "verifying" Mr. Bowen's 
quotations. As to the third work, the only copy 
I -could hear of, belonged to the Library of 
Harvard University and was, when I enquired 
for it, in Mr. Bowen's possession. Yet, says 
Mr. Bowen, any reader can verify my quotations 
with little difficulty ! 

(5) The communication to which Mr. Bowen 
here refers, treated of his quotations from "Cor- 
vinus," the Austrian " Official List," Schles- 
inger, Paget the English traveller, Pulszky, 
MeGulloch and De Langsdorff— and of no oth- 
ers. Of these, Pulszky is the only one whom 
Mr. Bowen could possibly suppose to be a 
Magyar, 

(6) This is Mr. Bowen's whole reply to the 
charge of garbling his authorities. It will be 
seen that with his customary artfulness, he en- 
deavors to make his readers believe that it was 
only Magyar writers whom he was charged 
with perverting — and that he attempts no de- 
fence of his fraudulent quotations from Robert- 
son, Coxe, Gibbon, Paget, De Langsdorff, &c. 
The substance of his apology is that he omitted 
only "irrelevant" matter — which is not true; 
as the reader can satisfy himself by referring 
back to the specimens of his mode of quoting 
on pages 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, &c, of this 
pamphlet. Mr. Bowen might as reasonably 
attempt to prove that the Scriptures authorized 
suicide, by quoting the texts, " Judas went and 
hanged himself — go thou and do likewise" — and 
then justify his citation by pleading that he 
had omitted only " irrelevant " passages. If 
he had said of some poem he was criticising in 
his Review, " This poem excels the Excursion 
and rivals Paradise Lost — in length, if in no 
other quality :." he would hardly consider the 
poet justified in quoting the North American 
as authority for the opinion that his work " ex- 
cels the Excursion and rivals Paradise Lost " — 
on the ground that he had omitted only some- 
thing "quite irrelevant" and that "the ex- 
plicit admissions of an opponent, every one 
knows, form the most valuable and unimpeach- 
able kind of evidence." Yet this is precisely 
the mode in which Mr. Bowen has cited author- 



ities against the Hungarians, and this is the 
sort of apology which he deliberately offers for 
doing so. 

(7) I will ask the reader to look back to page 
26, and then say if he ever saw a more flimsy 
or more disingenuous reply than this. Mr. 
Bowen, to prove that Kossuth and his associ- 
ates were bloody and merciless tyrants, brings 
forward an Austrian official document contain- 
ing a statement of several hundred cruel acts 
which it was alleged had been committed by 
the Hungarian government. To throw odium 
on the Hungarians Mr. Bowen quotes from this 
document the cases which appear to him most 
likely to serve his purpose. Commenting on his 
quotations, I said "the worthlessness of the 
thing is transparent," and quoted entire cases 
(some of which stood side by side with those 
quoted by Mr. Bowen) to show that the persons 
put to death were criminals-— assassins, spies 
and deserters, who were executed by order of 
the regular military and civil tribunals. Yefr 
Mr. Bowen says that I did not venture to ques- 
tion one of the cases he had quoted, and coolly 
asks, " were these unfair citations on my part ?" 
He endeavors to make it appear that my objec- 
tions were, that some of the cases " are of 
doubtful authenticity," and affirms that he 
cited only those about which there appears to 
be no doubt." My objection was that nine- 
tenths of the cases stated by the Austrian docu- 
ment were on the face of them, those of criminals 
who, if executed, were executed justly and legal- 
ly, or of persons put to death by mobs for which 
the Hungarian government was no more respon- 
sible than the American government was for 
the murder of Joe Smith, the Mormon. Noth- 
ing could be meaner or more unjust than to cull 
out the most plausible passages from such a 
document, and hold them up as " high official 
authority," that Kossuth and his associates 
were tyrants and murderers. 

(8) McCulloch cited the passage, as he ex- 
pressly says, because it was " a declaration of 
the right of the nation on the part of the crown." 
And he immediately proceeds to state, in his 
own language, facts which do confute the infer- 
ences that Mr. Bowen sought to establish by 
quoting the langiiage of Baron Baklacci. The 
statement of these facts Mr. Bowen suppressed, 
and substituted in their place a scrap taken from 
another section of McCulloch's article. If the 
passage from Baron Baldacci " was suited above 
all others for fair citation, because McCulloch 
gives the name as well as the words of his au- 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



37 



thority," why did not Mr. Bo wen. give tlie name 
as well as the words ? Why did he omit even 
the quotation marks, by which McCulloch had 
carefully distinguished the extract, and refer 
entirely to him as authority for the statement ? 

(9) This paragraph is meant for a reply to 
the charges [see ante, pp. 4, 5, 6] of plagiarism 
from the writers in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 
Instead of saying as it now reads, " of the 
sixty pages of that article, at least fifty are 
taken directly from the Revue, " &c. — I 
inadvertently wrote in the Boston Atlas, 
" of the sixty pages of that article, there are 
not fifty which are not taken directly from the 
Revue," &c. I did not perceive that the strict 
grammatical meaning of this, was the reverse of 
what I intended. But, as elsewhere I had ex- 
plicitly enough stated that the " War of Races " 
was throughout a plagiarism from De Langs - 
dorff and Desprez, it does not seem to me pos- 
sible that Mr. Bowen could have really mistaken 
my meaning, as he pretends to have done. I 
did not admit that " five-sixths of his article 
were not borrowed from any writer," nor did I 
admit that the other sixth " was so written 
that not one sentence of it was a literal transla- 
tion from the original." On the contrary, I 
quoted several passages in which there were 
dozens of sentences literally translated. The 
"full credit" given to MM. De Langsdorff and 
Desprez consisted in saying — "we depend for 
information chiefly on M. Degerando's book, 
and on a series of excellent articles contributed 
by E. de Langsdorff and H. Desprez to the 
Revue des Deux Mondes." [N. A. Review, 
p. 79.] I have shown, in preceding pages, that 
these "excellent articles," were depended on 
for something more than " information." 

(10) This is an amusing specimen of Mr. 
Bowen's peculiar mode of reasoning. A Polish 
nobleman who was opposed to the attempt which 
the Polish nobility made to throw off the yoke 
of Russia, must of course, he favorable to a sim- 
ilar attempt on the part of the Magyars ! And 
a Russian Minister, high in favor with the em- 
peror Nicholas, must also, of course, be favora- 
ble to the Magyars, ichom the Emperor sent an 
army to subdue ! " Here in America such reason- 
ing is sure to be appreciated at its true value." 
Mr. Bowen very well knows that Count Gurow- 
ski is a republican in sentiment, and that he is 
neither a Magyar, nor a partisan of the Mag- 
yars, though with all his Sclavonic partialities he 
is too candid to deny, that, in their war with 



Austria, they were fighting for freedom and 
republican institutions. 

(11) In reply to the "testimony" of this 
" Slovack clergyman," whom Mr. Bowen, it 
will be observed, takes good care not to name, it 
is only necessary to enlarge a little Mr. Bowen's 
own statement, and add a few particulars which 
he saw fit, judiciously enough, to omit. Per- 
haps he forgot them. They are these. Some- 
time previous to November, 1850, this " Slovack 
clergyman" arrived in this country from Eng- 
land, and represented himself as on a mission 
to obtain contributions for the assistance of the 
Unitarians of Hungary. He stated that his 
obj ect had been favorably regarded by the Uni- 
tarians of England, and that he had received 
pecuniary assistance from them on account of 
it. He was well received in Boston and its 
neighborhood, and obtained from Unitarian 
gentlemen a considerable sum of money for 
the use of the Unitarian churches in Hungary. 
He called on Mr. Bowen, as we have seen, and 
expressed himself delighted with his articles on 
Hungary. He called on persons who differed 
from Mr, Bowen in opinion, and was equally 
delighted with the soundness of their views. 
Mr. Bowen appears to have intended to use his 
" testimony " in his letters to the Boston Daily 
Advertiser, which were published in the last 
week of November, 1850. In one of those let- 
ters he alludes to this " Slovack clergyman" as 
" my informant," in a way which shows that 
the testimony had been inserted, and then has- 
tily suppressed. Why it was suppressed, may 
be conjectured from the fact, that just before 
Mr. Bowen's communication appeared in the 
Advertiser, letters were received in Boston 
from well-known Unitarians in England, con- 
veying information about the character and 
conduct of this " Slovack clergyman," the re- 
ceipt of which was speedily followed by his 
disappearance from the eyes of those who had 
been accustomed to behold him. With him 
also disappeared the money which had been 
contributed for the benefit of the Unitarians of 
Hungary. The last certain intelligence that I 
have of him is, that not long after his detection 
by the Unitarians, he was confronted and ex- 
posed by one of his own countrymen, who 
found him, in a neighboring town, endeavoring 
to pass himself off as a Univcrsalist, and dis- 
coursing unctuously upon the progress of Uni- 
versalism in Hungary. I have no doubt that if 
Mr. Bowen had charged the Magyars with can- 
nibalism, this man would have testified that he 



38 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



had seen them dining on the bodies of Slovacs, 
Croatians, Wallachians, &c. Neither have I 
any doubt that Mr. Bowen speaks the truth, 
when he says that he had not intended to print 
his testimony — for he knew perfectly well its 
utter worthlessness. It is to be regretted that 
he did not adhere to his intention, or at least 
not depart from it on the very eve of the meet- 
ing of a body which was to decide whether he 
should retain or be rejected from a respectable 
and lucrative professorship. Such testimony 
as that of this " Slovack clergyman," should 
not have been brought forward in so confident 
a manner, at such a moment. I need scarcely 
say that it is a tissue of falsehood from begin- 
ning to end. 

Before taking final leave of Mr. Bowen' s arti- 
cles on Hungary, it may be worth while to re- 
mark here, as a significant characteristic of 
them, that whenever he has occasion to speak 
of a man with a title, a Prince, a Count, a 
Baron, &c, it is invariably with marked respect 
— especially if the person so distinguished be a 
partisan of despotism. The putting to death of 
such a man he appears to regard as a crime al- 
most too horrible to be thought of, but for ple- 
beians who suffer a similar fate he expresses 
little sympathy. He never alludes to the deaths 
of Count Lamberg and Count Latour without a 
visible shudder, or without applying the most 
severe epithets to the deed. But of the brave 
and honest Hungarian General, Damianich, he 
says:— [N. A. R., Jan., 1851, p. 226]— " It is 
some consolation to know that this ruffian was 
one of the insurgent generals hanged at Arad 
after the surrender of Georgey." The great 
leaders of European republicanism, even the 
most illustrious in character and ability, are 
never mentioned without a sneer. Lamartine 
he speaks of as " our poor, phrase -making \ gasco- 
nading friend Lamartine" — Mazzini, whom it 
is charitable to suppose that Mr. Bowen is really 
as ignorant of, as he appears to be — is dismissed 
with brief contempt as " a veteran conspirator " 
— to conspire against the despots of Europe 
being, with Mr. Bowen, an unpardonable crime. 
Garibaldi, the Italian patriot hero, he calls " a 
leader of brigands." Kossuth, Mr. Bowen treats 
still more vilely. He never mentions the illus- 
trious Hungarian without a feeble sneer, or a 
mean insinuation. He calls him " a Slovac 
lawyer," " a demagogue and radical of the low- 
est stamp," "a fanatic and ultraist," "a flaming 
patriot," and a "renegade." He even descends 
so low as to rake up a calumny Avhich appeared 



in the English newspapers during the Hunga- 
rian war, (and was immediately and conclu- 
sively refuted,) to the effect that Kossuth, in 
conjunction with Georgey, had murdered Count 
Zichy, and, as Mr. Bowen phrases it, had "rob- 
bed the house of their victim after his execu- 
tion, and carried off from it some diamonds, 
emeralds and other articles of costly jewelry." 
In his anxiety to defame Kossuth, Mr. Bowen 
takes special pains to explain to his readers that 
" the accusation was, that the Magyar leaders 
devoted these valuables to their own uses, and 
did not put them into the treasury of their 
party."— [N. A. K.. Jan., 1851, p. 227]— That is 
to say, "the accusation was," that Kossuth is 
not only a murderer, but a thief! 



Mil. WEBB S ATTACK ON THE HUNGARIANS. 

Mr. James Watson Webb, who is sometimes 
called Colonel, and sometimes, I believe, Gen- 
eral W ebb, the editor of the New York Courier 
and Enquirer, printed as a supplement to his 
paper of April 11, 1851, a very long and viru- 
lent attack u- on the Hungarian cause, in which 
he said, " Our aim will be to show that Kossuth 
and his associates are entitled to none of our 
sympathy and but little of our respect * * * 
and that there is cause for every Republican 
heart to throb with joy instead of being shrouded 
in grief, that the war in Hungary terminated 
in the overthrow of Kossuth and his associates, 
in their heartless attempt to achieve their own 
independence of Austria, and at the same time 
of enslaving forever nearly ten millions of their 
country men.'' 

The following, among other positions, were 
laid down as clearly established by Mr. Webb, 
in this article : 

That Hungary consists of thirteen millions 
;mcl a half of people, of whom four millions and 
a half are Magyars (600,000 of them Nobles,) 
and about nine millions Croats, Wallachians, 
and other Sclavonic Races. 

That for eight centuries and upwards, the 
four and a half millions of Magyars, have kept 
iii the most servile bondage the nine millions 
of the Sclavonic races — whence is derived our 
term slave, as applied to the Southern Negro. 

That the slavery of this ten millions, was of 
the same absolute character as our Negro Slav- 
ery, only much more severe, because until abol- 
ished by Mbttkknich, in 1845, the Magyar No- 
ble had the power of life and death over the 
white Sclave, who is in intellect the equal of his 
master. 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



39 



That the Magyars having forced Austria to 
recognize their almost entire independence of 
the Empire, the Sclavouians of Hungary, actua- 
ted by the general spirit of Liberty which per- 
vaded Europe in 1848, and headed by the gal- 
lant Jellachich, Ban of Croatia, demanded 
from the Hungarian Diet, their freedom, and 
equality of social and political rights ; which 
the Magyars and the Magyar Government re- 
fused — Kossuth being the Minister of Finance, 
and the principal man in the Government. 

That therefore, the Ban of Croatia, and all 
the Sclavonic races, rose in revolt against then- 
oppressors. 

That this Avar was commenced by Hungary 
against Austria, by Kossuth's marching an 
army to Vienna, without Hungary's complain- 
ing, of any grievance against Austria — except 
that the Emperor would not aid the Magyars to 
keep the Sclaves in bondage — personal and 
political. 

That never until the 28th of July, only 
twelve days before the final fall of Kossuth, 
Georgey, and the Magyar nobility, did they 
ever even pretend to light for freedom or lib- 
erty, or offer equal rights to all races in Hun- 
gary. 

That Kossuth and his Government warred 
in defence of Slavery and Oppression, and against 
personal freedom, political liberty, and equality 
of personal and political rights ; and that all 
good men and friends of liberty throughout the 
world, should rejoice in his overthrow ; because 
it broke the chains of nine millions of white 
Slaves, held in bondage, and denied even per- 
sonal as well as political freedom, by four mil- 
lions and a half of proud, haughty and ambi- 
tious Magyars — a Tartar tribe, who for eight 
hundred years, have held in slavery the de- 
scendants of the Sclavonic races, Avhich they 
subjugated in the eleventh century. 

These propositions comprise the substance of 
Mr. Webb's charges against the Hungarians. 
The first of them is sufficient to show that he 
is grossly ignorant on the subject of the races 
of Hungary ; for he speaks of the Wallachlans 
as Sclavonians — which is as absurd a blunder as 
it would be for a writer on America, to call the 
Cherokces an Anglo-Saxon race. I might, in 
fact, properly enough dismiss the whole state- 
ment on the ground of its palpably outrageous 
improbability — for Avhat man of sense can be 
made to believe that four millions and a half of 
Magyars could, at the same time, successfully 
resist the armies of the Austrian Emperor, and 
keep in check ten millions of revolted Sclaves 
"in intellect the equal of their masters " ? But 
Mr. Webb, like Mr. Bowen, relies on "authori- 
ties" for proof of his proposition, and the 
greater part of the ten huge columns of his arti- 
cle are filled with quotations — all of which, with 
one or two exceptions, are stolen from Mr. Bowen' s 
articles in the North American Review. I say 
stolen, because Mr. Webb takes them without 



the slightest acknowledgment, copying word 
for word and letter for letter, nearly the whole 
of Mr. Bowen's translations and extracts, and 
passing them off as the result of his own reading 
and research. 

In proof of this, I will analyze this article of 
Mr. Webb, column by column, and point out, 
in detail, his obligations to Mr. Bowen. 

The first column is introductory, and bor- 
rowed substantially from Mr. Bowen, though 
Mr. Webb has taken the trouble to rewrite his 
plunder. He gives one of Mr. Bowen's tables 
of the population of Hungary — altering it, 
however, to suit himself so far as to convert 
2,400,000 Wallachians, 260,000 Magyar Szeklers 
and 250,000 Jews into Sclavonians ! 

The second column commences thus : 

"The Magyar race numbers just about one- 
third of the population ; yet in the hands of this 
one-third, for eight centuries have all power 
and authority rested, even to the life and death 
of the other races. They have ever been the 
masters — the other races the slaves ; and never 
has slavery assumed a more servile attitude 
than in Hungary — never have masters exercised 
such despotic, absolute, and unlimited power, 
as the Magyars have for centuries exercised 
over their dependants." 

This is Mr. Webb's statement — "the Magyars 
are masters — the other races slaves" — and 
slaves of the lowest and most degraded kind. 
No more absolute slavery has ever existed. He 
had just before said, in the preceding paragraph, 
that "the Croats, Wallachians, and all the other 
Sclavonic races, were as much slaves [to the 
Magyars] as are the negroes of Carolina slaves 
to their white masters." "In support of this," 
he proceeds to " quote largely from unques- 
tioned sources." Then follows his first quota- 
tion credited to " M. liey : Autriche, Honarie, et 
Turquie en 1839-48, as cited by Corvinns" — and 
"as cited by Mr. Bowen," Mr. Webb should 
have added ; for he has copied it word for word 
from the North American Review for January, 
1851, pp. 209-10. The anonymous " Corvinus " 
translated the passage from some obscure French 
writer, Mr. Bowen quoted it at second hand 
from him, and Mr. Webb gravely cites it at 
third hand from Mr. Bowen — without giving 
credit, however. Now let us sec in what man- 
ner M. Rev, as cited by Corvinus, as cited by 
Bowen, supports Mr. Webb's theory that the 
Sclavonians were all slaves, the Magyars all 
masters. The quotation begins thus : 

"The ancient collection of laws, the Triparti- 
tum declares that the nation or body politic, is 
composed exclusively of nobles ; accordingly out 
of 550,000 nobles, the Magyars count 404,000, 



40 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



which leaves only 86,000 with a proportionately 
feeble influence to the Sclaves, the Germans, and 
the Wallachians." 

It appears from this, then, that these poor 
Wallachians, Sclavonians, &c. who, according to 
Mr. Webb " are as much slaves, as are the ne- 
groes of Carolina slaves to their white masters" 
— count among their numbers no less than 
86,000 nobles! The complaint of Mr. Webb's 
"authority" is, not that the other races were 
slaves to the Magyars, but that of the 550,000 
nobles, too large a proportion belonged to the 
Magyar race, so that the other races had less 
political influence than their numbers entitled 
them to. The fact that there were 86,000 nobles 
of wow-Magyar race, is sufficient to refute the 
assertion that the Magyars were masters and the 
other races in the condition of negro slaves. I 
may as well remark here, that no part of the 
population of Hungary has been in such a con- 
dition for the last six or eight centuries. There 
was a class of nobles and a class of peasants — 
but the nobles were of all races, and the pea- 
sants of all races — there being millions of Mag- 
yar peasants, and, as Mr. Rey states 86,000 no- 
bles of Wallachian and Sclavonian race. But 
the peasants were very far from being slaves, 
and before the war with Austria commenced, all 
legal or political difference between them and 
the nobles had been abolished. 

Mr. Webb's Second Column contains seven 
other quotations : the first of which may be 
found on page 208, the second on page 207, the 
third on page 209, the fourth and fifth on page 
210, and the sixth and seventh on page 211 of the 
N. A. .Review for Jan., 1851. 

Mr. Webb's Third Column contains three 
quotations. The first, he says, is from an au- 
thority universally respected — Paget' s Hungary 
and Transylvania. He has- copied it from the 
N. A. Review, p. 213. It is the same passage 
Mr. Bowen's unfair treatment of which, I have 
pointed out above, p. 29. Mr. Webb has copied 
it word for word, and has not even taken the 
trouble to change the references from the scarce 
English edition used by Mr. Bowen, to the 
common American edition published a year or 
two ago at Philadelphia. One of the passages 
omitted in this quotation of "an authority uni- 
versally respected" relates to the fact that the 
Croatian Diet persisted in excluding Protestants 
from the country — a majority of their Magyar 
" masters " and " oppressors " being Protestants. 
Considering that they are " as much slaves as 
the negroes of Carolina," it is a little remarkable 
that these Croatians should not only have a 



legislature of their own, but should actuall 
take the liberty of excluding from the country 
the majority of their "masters," because of a 
difference of religion ! 

The second of the thre« quotations in Mr. 
Webb's Third Column, is taken from the N. A. 
Review, p. 217. The third quotation Mr. Webb 
introduces by saying "we quote from Count 
Mailath's Geschichte pp. 421-22." Count 
Mailath's Geschichte was published at Hamburg 
in 1850, and has not yet been translated. Pro- 
bably the only portion which has appeared in 
English is this identical passage, which was 
translated by Mr. Bowen and printed in his 
Review. Mr. Webb's translation, singularly 
'enough, corresponds to Mr. Bowen's, word for 
word, and letter for letter. Pie begins, like Mr. 
Bowen, in the middle of a paragraph and makes 
the very same omissions of inconvenient sen- 
tences. If he had not positively assurred us that 
he "quotes from Count Mailath's Geschichte 
pp. 421, 422" (he is very precise in his refer- 
ences) the inference would be irresistible, that 
he had copied the extract from the N. A. Re- 
view, pp. 220, 221, 222. 

In Mr. Webb's Fourth Column there are three 
quotations. The first and third of these are taken 
from the N. A. Review for Jan. 1851, pp. 222, 
223, 224 ; the second is taken from the N. A. 
Review, Jan. 1850, p. 116. Mr. Webb does not 
give any authority for it, which is not to be 
wondered at, for he had too much prudence to 
refer to Mr. Bowen as an " authority," and as 
Mr. Bowen had translated the extract without 
acknowledgment from the Revue des Deux Mon- 
des, it was of course somewhat difficult for Mr. 
Webb to give due credit for it ! In introducing 
the quotations in this column, Mr. Webb uncer- 
emoniously appropriates several of Mr. Bow- 
en's notes and observations. 

Mr. Webb's Fifth Column contains only two 
quotations. One of these is avowedly taken 
from the N. A. Review for Jan. 1850, p. 125 — 
where it appears as original with Mr. Bowen ; 
the other purports to be from an Austrian offi- 
cial pamphlet, of which I know nothing. It is 
an absurd and scandalous attempt to implicate 
Kossuth in the murder of Count Latour, who 
was put to death by the mob of Vienna in the 
sudden insurrection of October 6th, 1848, Kos- 
suth at the time being in Hungary several hun- 
dred miles distant ! As I have never seen the 
original, I cannot decide how much Mr. Webb has 
falsified this document,but one instance of perver- 
sion is so glaring as to be detected at first glance. 
An extract is given from a letter to Kossuth by 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



41 



Csany, a well-known Hungarian, who writes on 
the 7th of October, that he has sent three couri- 
ers from Vienna to Pesth " with very agreeable 
news." This " very agreeable news" was, of 
course, the triumphant Democratic insurrection 
of the day before, and the flight of the Emperor 
to Innspruck. Mr. Webb, however, attempts 
to deceive his readers by informing them, in a 
parenthesis, that this very agreeable news was 
the murder of Latour ! This he repeats at 
every opportunity, whenever the news from 
Vienna is mentioned. 

Mr. Webb's Sixth Column contains only one 
quotation — a long one from Brownson's Quar- 
terly Review ! The value of this, as an autho- 
rity on the affairs of Hungary, it is not necessary 
to discuss. 

Mr. Webb's Seventh Column contains one 
extract which is from a letter of Archbishop 
Raiachich, describing the cruelties practised in 
the South-eastern part of Hungary in the begin- 
ning of the war. It is copied from the N. A. 
Review for Jan. 1851, p. 224. It is dated Car- 
lo witz, August 1, 1848. Mr. Webb introduces 
it by saying that " Kossuth despatched General 
Bern into Transylvania to strike terror into that 
region — ichat Bern did there, and how he con- 
ducted the war amid that simple and almost 
unarmed people, the following document will 
show. Comment is unnecessary." 

•« Comment is unnecessary," indeed, except 
to remark that the Archbishop's letter related 
not to Transylvania but to the Bannat, and that 
on the 1st of August, 1848, Bern had not yet 
made his appearance in the Hungarian war. 
On the 14th of October of that year, he, for the 
first time, appeared at Vienna, then in revolt 
against the Emperor. On his flight from that 
city, a fortnight later, he became acquainted 
with Kossuth, whom he met on the steamboat 
which was conveying them down the Danube. 
It was not till the 26th of November that Bern 
set out from Pesth to conquer Transylvania, and 
his military operations in that country did not 
fairly commence till the 20th of December. It 
is manifest, therefore, Mr. Webb to the contrary 
notwithstanding, that a document dated August 
1, 1848, could not throw much light on Bern's 
proceedings four or five months afterwards. 
This is one of fifty instances, in which Mr. 
Webb betrays a ludicrous ignorance of the mat- 
ter he so glibly writes about. 

Mr. Webb's Eighth Column contains three 
extracts. The first is from a Hungarian Mani- 
festo and is copied from the North American, 
Jan. 1850, p. 81. The second and third (origi- 

4* 



nally from the Revue des Deux Mondes) are copied 
from N. A. Review, Jan. 1851, p. 235. 

In Mr. Webb's Ninth Column there are three 
quotations, all of which are borrowed from the 
N. A. Review, pp. 212, 214, 234. 

Finally in the Tenth and last Column there 
are eight quotations, all of which may be seen 
verbatim in the N. A. Review for Jan. 1851, pp. 
205, 206, 219, 230, 234. 

It appears, therefore, that of Mr.Webb's thirty- 
tioo quotations from "authorities," thirty are 
copied from the North American Review, with- 
out acknowledgment, and paraded before the 
readers of the New York Courier and Enquirer 
as the result of the laborious researches of the 
learned editor of that journal ! Mr. Webb, in 
fact, has plundered Mr. Bowen as unscrupu- 
lously as Mr. Bowen plundered the writers in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes. He does not appear 
to have seen one of the books from which he 
pretends to quote, and I am quite confident that 
his studies in Hungarian history have been con- 
fined almost entirely to the veracious pages of 
the North American Review. 

In addition to his pilfered quotations from the 
North American Review, Mr. Webb endeavors 
to strengthen his position on the subject of 
Hungary by relating his personal experience in 
that country. In 1850, I think it was, he was 
appointed to represent this country at the court 
of Vienna, but the Senate of the United States 
by an almost unanimous vote refused to confirm 
so unfit a nomination, and Mr. Webb was speed- 
ily recalled from Austria. During his stay in 
Vienna, he says he made this whole subject his 
study, and afterwards pursued his investigations 
in Hungary itself. He thus details his expe- 
rience : 

When we had exhausted our research in 
Vienna, (!) and by conversations with the Mag- 
yar nobles learned precisely the feelings and 
objects and purposes of the late war in Hun- 
gary, we obtained permission from the Austrian 
Government, (at that period such a course was 
necessary,) and visited Hungary itself, to judge 
for ourselves of all we had heard. We pene- 
trated as far as Buda and Pesth, (!) where we 
had every facility of pursuing our investiga- 
tions unmolested ; and we stopped at Komorn, 
and lingered at Presburgh, actuated alike by the 
recollections of the past and the sad desolation 
of the present. In our own happy country, 
thank God, we know nothing of the desolation 
of war ; but above all and over all — of a war 
of races, as was most emphatically the war in 
Hungary ; and to describe what we saw in this 
regard, would be only to make man hate his 
fellow man. One incident told us the whole story 
as regards the hatred of the now freed Sclave 
to his late master. 



42 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



In crossing the suspension bridge, which con- 
nects Buda, the ancient Offen, with Pesth — 
which by the way is the finest structure of the 
kind we met with — our coachman, once a Slave, 
now a free Sclave, pointed cxultingly to a man 
paying toll. We inquired of our courier what 
it meant; and he explained that the person 
pointed to, was a small Magyar noble, whose 
right it was, formerly, to pass, toll free, but who 
now was considered no better than the late 
slave, and was required to pay toll like him. 
The exultation of the Sclave at this spectacle, 
his spirited crack of the whip, and almost hurra 
for freedom, told as plainly as words could have 
done, that the Magyar rule was at an end, and 
that tyranny and oppression fell with Kossuth 
and his Magyar nobility. 

Great deference is due to the statements and 
opinions of the inquisitive and adventurous 
traveller who has explored foreign lands and 
speaks of what he has seen. And there is some- 
thing peculiarly romantic and imposing in Mr. 
Webb's solemn assertion that he "stopped at 
Komorn and lingered at Presburgh," and that 
he even "penetrated as far as Buda and Pesth." 
But with all my admiration for the intrepidity 
of his explorations, I cannot refrain from stating 
that steamboats ply regularly between Vienna 
and Buda-Pesth, and that the distance between 
them is just 135 miles, or ten miles less than 
the distance from New York to Albany ! Ko- 
morn and Presburg are both upon the river, 
and the boat which conveyed the enterprising- 
explorer, probably stopped at those places to 
land or receive passengers. Mr. Webb saw 
about as much of Hungary as a foreigner, ig- 
norant of English, would see of the United 
States, who should land at New York, embark 
on a Hudson river steamboat, and "stopping" 
at West Point and " lingering " at Poughkeep- 
sie, "penetrate as far as" — Albany ! 

The gross and almost incredible ignorance 
of Hungary which Mr. Webb displays through- 
out his article, is strikingly manifested in this 
account of his travels. He calls Buda "the 
ancient Offen." In reality Buda has been the 
name of the city from time immemorial. Offen 
is merely its German name. But the most pal- 
pable exposure of ignorance, if not of falsehood, 
is in the anecdote of the coachman, " once a 
Slave now a free Sclave." The law which de- 
creed that all passengers, whether nobles or not } 
should pay toll on this suspension bridge, was 
passed in 1836. It was passed by a Diet com- 
posed exclusively of nobles who thus voluntarily 
relinquished their privilege of passing a bridge 
toll-free. The privilege, too, had no connection 
with race. Sclavonic nobles as well as Mag. 
yar nobles passed free, while Magyar peasants 



paid toll as well as Sclavonic peasants. And 
yet, in 1850, fourteen years after the passage of 
this law, Mr. Webb pretends that his coachman, 
" the late slave," was still so unused to the spec- 
tacle of a Magyar noble paying toll that his 
exultation was strong enough to tell " as plainly 
as words could have done, that the Magyar 
rule was at an end, and that tyranny and oppres- 
sion fell with Kossuth and his Magyar nobility." 
I have not the least doubt that the story is a 
mere fabrication. The coachmen at Buda-Pesth, 
whether Sclaves or not, have for centuries been 
as free as coachmen in New York. Every well- 
dressed man, of whatever race, was allowed to 
pass without paying toll on the old bridge, and 
on the new bridge, the coachman must have 
seen, every time he crossed it, dozens of men 
paying toll, who, fourteen years before would 
have been exempt. Mr. Webb's attempt to 
demonstrate by this invention that Kossuth and 
his party (by whose exertions the special privi- 
leges of the nobles were abolished) were tyrants 
and oppressors, is perfectly in keeping with the 
stupid ignorance and malignant falsehood which 
characterize his whole article. 

Contemptible as this article is, it has, I am 
ashamed to say, acquired a certain degree of 
importance, and a good deal of notoriety, from 
having been read, in whole or in part, to the 
Senate of the United States as an argument 
against the Resolution of Welcome to Kossuth. 
But for this circumstance it would have been 
unnecessary to notice it as a part of the Hunga- 
rian Controversy. Neither in itself, nor from 
the character of its author, is it entitled to the 
least consideration. 



THE POLITICAL STATE OF HUNGARY. 

In the foregoing pages I have confined myself 
chiefly to an exposure of the mode in which 
Messrs. Bowen and Webb have sought to estab- 
lish the truth of their charges against the Hun- 
garians, without attempting directly to disprove 
the charges themselves. I think the reader 
will admit, that whether those charges be true 
or false, I have shown conclusively, that the 
methods resorted to in order to sustain them, 
are outrageously unjust and dishonest. I will 
now consider the charges themselves. The 
groundwork or basis of them all, is the political 
and social state of Hungary in the latter part 
of 1848, when the war with Austria began. It 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



43 



is alleged by Messrs. Bowen and Webb that, at 
that period, the Magyar nobility were absolute 
masters of the country, all the political power 
of which was in their hands, and that they 
domineered over and oppressed the Croatians, 
Sclavonians, Wallachians, Germans and other 
races. These other races, according to Mr. 
Bowen, were the "subjects" and "vassals" 
of the Magyar nobility. " The present position 
of the Magyars in Hungary," he says, " is very 
much what that of the Normans in England 
was for the first century or two after the Con- 
quest" — [N. A. Review, Jan., 1850, p. 91.] — 
Again, p. 122, he says of the Magyars, "their 
cause was bad ; they sought to defend their ancient 
feudal institutions, a,nd their unjust and excessive 
privileges as an order and a race, against the incur - 
sion of the liberal ideas and the reformatory spirit 
of the nineteenth century." Mr. Webb, as we 
have seen above, (pp. 38-9) asserts that the 
other races in Hungary were absolute slaves to 
the Magyars — that their condition was even 
more degraded than that of the negro slaves 
of South Carolina. And both of these writers 
maintain that the Hungarian war was nothing- 
more nor less than an attempt on the part of the 
Magyars, with Kossuth at their head, to keep 
their subject races down, while Austria was 
.striving to raise them up. 

Let us now see how far these statements are 
sustained by competent witnesses. 

The best English book of travels in Hungary 
is " Hungary and Transylvania, by John Paget." 
Mr. Paget visited Hungary in 1835, thirteen 
years before the war with Austria. Mr. Bowen 
says his work is " excellent and impartial." 
Mr. Webb says he is " an authority universally 
respected." Here are some extracts from his 
chapter on " Country Life and Peasantry," 
chap. 11, volume 1. 

" It was not till 1405 that the Hungarian 
peasant seems to have had a recognized civil 
existence. In that year it was first declared 
that the peasant should have the power to leave 
the place where he was born, in case he could 
obtain his lord's consent ; which consent, how- 
ever, it was provided, should not be arbitrarily 
refused. It must not be imagined that, because 
this was the first legal notice of the peasant's 
existence, he had formerly been treated as a 
mere slave. Slavery had been, in fact, abolished 
on the introduction of Christianity." [A. D. 1000] 
#**#*«. rj<h e S pi r it in which the new 
TJrbarium [a law enacted by the nobles in 1835] 
is conceived, may be imagined from the avowed 
principle, that where it icas safe and proper, the 
rights of the peasant should be increased, and his 
burdens diminished ; but in no instance should his 
privileges, hotoever attained, be curtailed. * * * 



Since the passing of this law, it can scarcely be 
said any longer that the peasant alone pays 
taxes ; for it is especially provided, that should 
a noble purchase a peasant's fief he is not only 
liable to all the labor and payment of the land- 
lord, but also to all the taxes of government, 
county rates, &c. * * * * I have entered 
thus at length into the laws affecting the Hun- 
garian peasantry, especially those which regu- 
late their intercourse with their lords ; because 
I have been anxious to show that they are not, 
as strangers commonly suppose, serfs, nor their 
lords tyrants, with unlimited power over their 
lives and fortunes." 

These are Mr. Paget' s statements as to the 
condition of the Hungarian peasants in 1835. 
Here is what he says of the party to which 
Kossuth belonged — the party opposed to Aus- 
tria: 

"The favorite objects of their desires were, 
after strengthening the nationality of Hungary, 
freedom of commerce and an improved commer- 
cial code ; the navigation of the Danube, and 
the improvement of internal communication ; 
increased freedom and education of the peasantry ; 
the repeal of the laics preventing the free purchase 
and sale of landed property, perfect equality of all 
religions, and the freedom of the press. For the 
greater part of these objects they are still struggling.' ' 
—[Vol. i., p. 102.] 

Another high authority, a most accurate and 
intelligent writer, McCulloch, says in a passage 
which I have quoted before, (p. 30) and which 
was written in 1840 — "At present, except the 
right of election, which is vested in the 267,300 
nobles, there is no jyolitical privilege which the loivest 
Hungarian does not enjvj, in common with the in- 
habitants of the other constitutional states of Europe" 

Yet, says Mr. Bowen, the great mass of the 
Hungarian people in 1848, were serfs and vas- 
sals to the nobles, while according to Mr. Webb, 
they were more absolute slaves than the negroes 
of South Carolina ! 

In the Monthly Chronicle for August, 1841, 
a magazine which was edited, I believe, by 
Hon. Nathan Hale of the Boston Daily Adver- 
tiser, there is published a letter from an Ameri- 
can gentleman travelling in Hungary, to his 
friend in Boston, which letter I have reason to 
suppose, was written by Mr. George Sumner, 
brother to Hon. Charles Sumner, of the United 
States Senate. He says, under date of May 1, 
1841: 

"I must tell you something of Hungary; of 
which you know nothing, (that I will venture 
to say at this great distance) and which is after 
Russia, the most interesting, and the most mis- 
represented country which I have visited. One 
can form no idea abroad of the movement which 
is going on among this people ; it is really 
mighty. Their own journals are all in Hunga- 



44 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



rian {Magyar) and it is only through Austvi&n \ subjects ; it is they who, in a solemn day, have willed 
papers that a ray of light occasionally finds its .to break them forever."— Bevue des Deux Mondes, 
way to Europe. The Austrians dread the spirit 
of freedom and independence which prevails in 
Hungary, and use all efforts to spread abroad 



the opinion, that the country is inhabited by 
race of turnip-eating savages, who murder their 
peasants when they will, and who are only kept 
within the pale of humanity by the kindly and 
beneficent influence of the enlightened govern- 
ment of Austria. But at the Diet- of Hungary, 
all the measures for the improvement of the 
country— all measures for ^ liberating the peasants, 
for limiting the amount of labor that may be re- 
quired of them, for elevating their condition — all 
these have been proposed by the people, that is 
the favored part of the people who compose the 
Diet, [the nobles'] and have been uniformly opposed 
by Austria." 

M. Degerando, a French gentleman who re- 
sided many years in Hungary and whose works 
are of the highest authority, said in 1845, in a 
passage which was quoted by Mrs. Putnam in 
the N. A. Review for April, 1850, p. 329. 

" To the Hungarian nobility belongs the honor of 
having been the first to propose all these neio laws. 
Under the eyes of a retrograde government, they are 
accomplishing a task before which the aristocracies 
of every other country have shrunk back. They 
prepare the reign of equality, before the people 
for whose good they labor have yet thought of 
raising their voice. We have said that the peo- 
ple, raised by degrees from servitude, have now 
become citizens, since, according to the last de- 
cisions, they have now a right to possess the 
land. Let us add, that the nobles have now 
resolved to take on themselves half the expenses 
of the comitat, which the peasants have borne 
alone up to this time. Not only does this 
aristocracy accord the rights granted to the 
inferior classes, but it also despoils itself of the 
privileges that it has possessed for ten centu- 
ries ; it offers spontaneously to pay imposts to 
which it has never been subjected, and breaks 
of itself the last barrier which separates it from 
the people. We regret that Europe is not more 
attentive to these noble efforts. This is a work 
which merits the ardent sympathy of all free 
countries ; and it belonged to a people generous 
as the Magyars to give this spectacle to the 
world." 

I have quoted once before the statement of 
M. De Langsdorff, a writer hostile to the Hun- 
garians and a warm partisan of Austria — but it 
will bear repetition. 

"In 1836, the Diet decreed that the nobles 
should be subjected to toll on the suspension 
bridge which was about to be constructed at 
Pesth. This was the first breach made in the 
privileges of the nobility ; and it teas by the 
nobility that it was made. There, where I felt 
onl}' a sterile emotion, generous citizens, sacri- 
ficing their interests without hesitation, found 
the opportunity to repair a long injustice. 
Since that time the Hungarian nobles have walked 
resolutely in that path ; it is they who, for twenty 
years, have been laboring to file the chains of their 



August 1, 1848. 

Another of these anti-Hungarian writers in 
the Revue des Deux Monde s, M. Desprez, candidly 
says, in an article dated Aug. 15, 1848 : — 

" In reading the history of the contests of the 
Magyars with Austria, and of their constitu- 
tional progress, we are pleased to recognize, with 
M. de Degerando, their generous qualities, their 
liberalism, and all the services which they have 
rendered to modern ideas. They have power- 
fully contributed to reanimate political life in 
the veins of old Austria, and now they possess, 
more than any other people of the empire, the 
experience of constitutional government and of 
parliamentary discussions, the spirit of adminis- 
tration and of political eloquence." 

These citations will be sufficient to show that 
the peasants or lower classes of Hungary were 
neither slaves nor serfs, nor degraded and op- 
pressed in the years immediately preceding the 
war with Austria. It will be observed that the 
writers I have quoted, speak of the higher class 
as the nobles, and the lower class as the peasants, 
and that they do not allude to the existence of 
any political or legal distinction between the 
Magyars and the other races — the Sclavonians, 
Croatians, and Wallachians, &c, for " whose 
down-trodden condition" Messrs. Bowen and 
Webb exhibit such an ardent, I might almost 
say, such a " fanatical " sympathy. The reason 
is that there icas no such distinction. The whole 
theory of these gentlemen about Magyar supre- 
macy and Magyar tyranny, is utterly unfounded. 
There were, for ages, great and unjust inequali- 
ties of class in Hungary. The nobles had ex- 
cessive privileges, and the peasants were sub- 
jected to grievous burdens — but it was not an 
affair of race at all. The nobles were of all 
races, and the peasants were of all races. The 
nobles of Magyar race had no privileges which 
did not belong to the nobles of the other races, 
and the Magyar peasants were exempt from no 
burdens which were borne by the peasants of 
the other races. 

In the Christian Examiner for May, 1850, 
Mrs. Putnam has stated this matter with her 
usual clearness and accuracy. She says : — 

"There have not been, since the earliest 
times, any political distinctions in Hungary, 
founded on difference of race. The distinction 
between privileged and unprivileged classes was 
not a growth of Magyar institutions, nor a con- 
sequence of the Magyar Conquest. When the 
Magyars entered the country, they found the 
institution of serfdom already existing there ; 
but with the exception of the prisoners taken 
in arms against them, all whom they found free 
they left free. Those who submitted, without 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



45 



offering resistance to the conquerors, were even 
left in possession of their estates. The wide 
plains of Dacia afforded ample room to the in- 
vaders. The prisoners taken in war were re- 
ceived into the army of the victors. If they 
distinguished themselves by their courage, they 
were raised to the rank of nobles, and received 
grants of land in reward of their services. "With- 
in a hundred years after the occupation of the 
country by the Magyars, all the inhabitants, of 
whatever race, were regarded as composing one 
nation, called the Magyar or Hungarian nation. 
The Magyar race is, without question, re- 
garded as the ascendant race in Hungary; the 
country takes its name from them ; its political 
constitution is of Magyar origin. This ascen- 
dency, however, is not supported by any pecu- 
liar political privileges. The Magyar is the 
ascendant race in Hungary, as the Anglo-Saxon 
is the ascendant race in the United States. The 
allegation that the other races in Hungary are 
deprived of their political rights, is as absurd as 
it would be to say that the Germans of Penn- 
sylvania, or the French of Louisiana, are not 
represented in the Congress of the United States, 
because they do not sit there as Germans or as 
Frenchmen, but as citizens of the United States. 
The whole Hungarian nation, without distinc- 
tion of the races composing it, is called the 
Magyar or Hungarian, — in Magyar, Magyarok 
(pi.); in Latin, Hungari. Some of the most 
distinguished patriots both of past and present 
times, have been of Slavonian and Wallachian 
descent." 

In corroboration of this last statement, I 
will mention that the two most famous men in 
the ancient history of Hungary, John Hunni- 
ades and his son King Matthias Corvinus, were 
of "Wallachian race. Yet the former became 
Governor, and the latter, King of Hungary — 
by election ! So, too, in the recent history of 
Hungary many of the most eminent and popu- 
lar men have sprung from other races than the 
Magyar. According to Mr. Bowen, Kossuth 
himself is not a Magyar, but a Slovack. — 
Pulszky, the Hungarian Envoy to England, is 
of Sclavonic race. The Minister of Justice in 
Kossuth's government, Vukovich, was of Ser- 
vian race ; the Minister of Finance, Duschek, 
of Sclavonic. 

The exact facts in this matter are — that the 
nobles of Hungary, by a series of legislative 
acts, commencing in 1832 and terminating 
March, 1848, six months before the war with 
Austria began, voluntarily relinquished all 
their privileges, and granted equal rights to 
all the inhabitants of Hungary ; that among 
those rights v/as that of voting ; that the Diet 
or Legislature which governed the country 
when the war began, was elected by universal 
suffrage, and was composed of men of all races 
and classes. Bearing these facts in mind the 



reader can appreciate the character of Mr 
Bowen's charge against the Magyars, that in 
their war with Austria " they sought to defend 
their ancient feudal institutions, and their unjust 
and excessive privileges as an order and a race, 
against the incursion of the liberal ideas and the 
reformatory spirit of the nineteenth century." 



THE WAR WITH AUSTRIA. 

The true causes and objects of the war in 
Hungary may be very briefly told. In the early 
part of 1848, the Hungarians, under the leader- 
ship of Kossuth and Batthiany, had succeeded 
in obtaining what they had long aimed at — a 
responsible ministry, a strictly constitutional 
form of government, the abolition of all privi- 
leges of class, the freedom of the press, and 
other liberal institutions. So soon, however, 
as the Austrian government recovered from its 
panic at the revolutions of Paris, Vienna and 
Italy, it sought to reduce the Hungarians to 
subjection. The first step towards the accom- 
plishment of this, was to weaken and distract 
the Hungarians, by stirring up rebellions among 
the ignorant and fanatical border population of 
Hungary, the Croats, Servians and "Wallachians, 
who are mostly of the Greek Church. By art- 
fully working on the natural jealousies of race, 
and on the bigotry of these people, it succeeded 
in persuading a portion of them to side with 
the Emperor, against the government of Hun- 
gary. A fact which no more condemns the 
Hungarian cause,than the adhesion of the Tories 
and of the Canadians to George III. condemns 
our devolution. The great mass of the other 
races cordially united with the Magyars in 
upholding that government. Even in Croatia, 
the hostility to the Hungarian government was 
very far from universal, though a large body of 
Croatians, when called upon by their popular 
and influential Ban or Chief, Jellachich, in the 
name of the Emperor, followed him into Hun- 
gary, from which they were speedily expelled. 
This began the war. The imperial armies in- 
vaded Hungary. For a time, the Hungarians 
fought merely in defence of their constitutional 
rights. But when it became manifest, by the 
promulgation of the Constitution of Olmutz, 
that the Austrian Emperor was determined to 
reduce Hungary from an independent kingdom 
into a mere province of Austria, they renounced 
all allegiance to the House of Hapsburg, elected 



46 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY, 



Kossuth. Governor, and prosecuted the war 
with the view of founding a Republic. Arthur 
Frey, a writer to whose authority Mr. Bowen 
appeals, says, speaking of the spring of 1849 : 

"The Hungarian struggle now began to as- 
sume that import which the party of the republi- 
cans, Kossuth at their head, the Poles and the 
many foreigners in the Hungarian army, had 

been striving to give it Kossuth 

had only waited for the favorable moment ; he 
had left the house of Hapsburg time enough to 
extinguish, by their conduct, the last spark of 
attachment in the hearts of the people. Now, 
when the lips of every Magyar had only curses 
for the hitherto reigning family, Kossuth tore 
away the veil of constitutionality with which 
he had hitherto covered his republican plans ; 
now he showed them boldly ; now he spoke it 
out in thundering tones, that only under a repub- 
lican form of government could Hungary be free 
and happy ; and the nation, which, perhaps, two 
months before, would have shuddered at the 
idea, now shouted forth its joyful and trium- 
phant approbation." — Ludwig Kossuth und Un- 
garns neuesie Geschichte, III., 13, 14, as cited by 
Mrs. Putnam. 

And here is more conclusive evidence. It is 
an extract from a speech which was made to the 
Diet in April, 1849, by Szemere, the Secretary of 
State, the Head of Kossuth's Cabinet. 

"The ministry comes forward with no long- 
programme. Three points, however, must be 
named. Pirst, the ministry acknowledges itself 
to be a revolutionary government. It will not, 
therefore, shrink from any means conducive to 
the rescue of the country. With the return of 
peace it will cease to be a revolutionary govern- 
ment ; extraordinary measures can be justified 
only by extreme necessity. Secondly, the min- 
istry declares itself to have a republican tendency. 
The enemy of monarchy, it is, in like manner, 
the enemy of every republic which preaches 
that • property is robbery.' It wishes — God 
permitting — a republic which shall bless rather 
than shine. Thirdly, the ministry declares itself 
to have a democratic tendency. It adopts the 
principle of the sovereignty of the people in all, — 
yes, in all its consequences." 

This is an official Declaration made at the time, 
by the Prime Minister of Kossuth's Cabinet, of 
the objects and tendencies of the Revolutionary 
Government of Hungary, six months after the 
beginning of the War and four months before 
its close. It is no after-thought, no subsequent 
pretence, and is as clear and decided as language 
will admit of. The reader can determine for 
himself which is most worthy of credit, this 
explicit official declaration, or the theory of 
Messrs. Bowen & Webb, (supported as it is by 
dishonest quotations, and untrustworthy " au- 
thorities") — that the War in Hungary was a 
mere struggle on the part of the Magyars to 
preserve feudal institutions, and keep in subjec- 



tion eight or ten millions of their own country- 
men — and on the part of Aiistria, an attempt to 
free those subject millions, and give to them 
liberal constitutional institutions, including 
Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and 
Universal Suffrage. For my part, I do not think 
it necessary to argue such a question, nor to 
offer further evidence upon it. 



KOSSUTH IN HUNGARY. 



I have adverted in the foregoing pages, to the 
attacks of Messrs. Bowen and Webb upon the 
character and conduct of Kossuth. Now that 
the American people have seen with their own 
eyes, and heard with their own ears the illus- 
trious governor of Hungary, an elaborate reply 
to these defamations is scarcely needed. They 
have witnessed for themselves his matchless 
eloquence, his inexhaustible energy, his frank 
and dignified demeanor. They have hailed him 
with unparalleled enthusiasm, not only as a man 
of the loftiest genius, but of the purest and 
noblest character. In greatness of intellect, in 
greatness of heart, the spontaneous acclamation 
of America places him among the foremost of 
the age, if not of any age. Yet it may be of 
interest to know in what light he is regarded in 
his own country, and in what estimation he was 
and still is held by his own people. I shall 
conclude my task, therefore, by quoting from 
the most valuable and accurate work that has 
yet been written on the Hungarian War — that 
of Schlesinger — some passages descriptive of 
Kossuth in Hungary. 

From the first moment when he was hurried 
into public life, the character of Kossuth was 
stamped with such resolution, that the policy 
of the Austrian government never ventured an 
attempt to gain him over to their side. Prince 
Metternich and his creatures in the Pressburg 
Diets were at other times not chary of their 
means and appliances, whenever they required 
to win over any distinguished persons to the 
cause of the Government. But for Kossuth, 
whose talents were justly appreciated, and the 
dangerous power of whose integrity was practi- 
cally recognized by the prosecutions against him, 
the great bird-snarer deemed it labor lost to 
spread his nets. No insidious tempter approach- 
ed Kossuth ; and this is even a greater proof of 
his integrity and incorruptible honor, than if he 
had resisted the arts of temptation. 

* * * * * * * 

The favorite author of Kossuth was, Rousseau, 
as might partly be inferred from the opening of 
his career. He was still young when he quitted 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



4'; 



prison, but his hatred of the Austrian system of 
police had become confirmed and embittered 
during his imprisonment. A martyr in the 
cause of freedom of speech, his genius, his elo- 
quence, his fervent zeal, above all his patriotism, 
clinging with fond attachment to the old insti- 
tutions of Hungary, yet enthusiastic in his aspi- 
rations for a progressive development of her re- 
sources, early gained for him the sympathies of 
all the youth of his- country. 

In 1817 he was elected a member of the Diet, 
and here he unfolded the principles of his party 
with sueh forcible eloquence, that they soon 
became the most powerful leaders in the coun- 
try. Here he delivered his masterly speeches 
in stipport of equalizing the claims of the nationali- 
ties, the emancipation of all sects of religion from 
civil disabilities, the abrogation of the bur dens which 
oppressed the peasants, and in opposition to the ex- 
clusive privileges of the nobility and, the high clergy- 

The enthusiasm with which Kossuth's 
speeches were received found its way and car- 
ried his principles alike into the poorest hovel 
on the Putzta and into the Assembly of the 
Magnates. EveryAvhere the seed fell on genial 
soil, and many high-minded and energetic men 
in the higher walks of life received, adopted, and 
propogated Kossuth's opinions. 

* * * #- * * * 

Kossuth attended the sittings of the Diet at 
Dcbreczin [during the war] only when he had 
communications of importance to make, or pro- 
positions which he wished personally to lay be- 
fore the Assembly. At these times he was like 
a king without throne or canopy, — the House 
and the Tribune, the hearts of all present were 
for an hour's space at his entire command ; and 
we may apply to him the words which Lamar- 
tine used in speaking of Mirabeau : " From the 
moment of his entry into the National Assembly 
he alone filled it : he was there, himself the 
People : his gestures were commands, his mo- 
tions Coups d'Etats." 

Kossuth always went to the House of Assembly 
on foot, and it was touching to witness the joy 
and reverence with which every one saluted him 
in the streets. The women seemed bewitched 
by hi3 look, and had no glance for any one else 
when he appeared, although he cannot exactly 
be called handsome : an expressive melancholy 
trembles around his eye when he is silent ; and 
it is not until he speaks, especially when in an 
impassioned strain and in Hungarian, that his 
features acquire their full animation and signifi- 
cance. He expresses himself fluently in Ger- 
man, which he is fond of speaking, and his 
German style is pure and elegant ; yet he can- 
not dissemble his Magyar accent. 

It was touching to see Kossuth walk along 
the streets : every one stepped aside with the 
utmost respect, and the children stared with 
open eyes and mouth. Every now and then a 
pert little urchin would salute him with his 
" Eljen Kossuth ! " or some old woman would 
mutter to herself devoutly, a blessing as the 
Governor passed her. The peasant's eye spar- 
kled with joy and pride when he saw him, 
and standing close against the wall to let him 
pass, he gave him his blessing — " Isten Aldja ! " 
and forgot to replace the fur cap on his head, 



as he followed the Governor with, eager gaze 
until he turned the corner. Kossuth was in 
his eyes a model of wisdom and goodness, the 
impersonation of all that was excellent upon 
earth, the pride of his existence, the hope of 
his children. For Kossuth every peasant was 
ready at any moment to face death — to mount 
the gallows or be slain upon the spot. Nor will 
this attachment die out among the people ; it 
is rooted too deeply in the heart of the young 
Magyar, who has been taught to cherish it from 
the cradle up, and whose first prayer, when he 
awakes in the morning, and when he goes to 
sleep at night, is for Kossuth. 

Were Austria to-morrow to recognize the 
Hungarian paper-money at its full nominal, 
value, and receive it in exchange for Austrian 
bank-notes, yet thousands of the Kossuth-notes 
would remain buried in the earth ; for the peas- 
ants look upon them as of more genuine value 
than Austrian bank-paper because bearing Kos- 
suth's name. 

****** * 

Kossuth was religious in the noblest sense of 
the word. Relying on the justice of God, he 
had faith in the victory of a cause which he 
deemed sacred, in the virtue of mm, and in the 
strength of the human will. He worshipped 
the Creator by honoring the creature ; he re- 
spected man by devoting the whole energies of 
a warm heart to his country. Such a religion 
of love has power to overaw r e even the most 
hateful natures. Napoleon, in his time, was 
ridiculed in thousands of satires and caricatures ; 
before Kossuth, even the frivolous malice of his 
enemies shrunk abashed. It was not the power 
of his genius, nor the temporary height to which 
he was raised that overawed these men ; but 
the uprightness of Kossuth's mind, the sanctity 
and greatness of his thoughts, the unselfish 
devotion of his noble heart, imparted to him an 
unapproachable dignity in spite of his failings 
and errors. 

Kossuth combines two talents, which are 
rarely found in one and the same individual ; 
he knows as well when to be silent as when to 
speak : he understands the art of listening, in 
such a manner as to convince the speaker that 
the silence of his auditor proceeds not from 
absence of mind, but from calm, undivided 
attention. The slight and quick motion of the 
corners of his mouth, and the raising or depres- 
sion of his eyelids, betray the degree of interest 
he feels and his assent to what is said ; for he 
has never known or practiced the art of smooth- 
ing his features into an impassive and impene- 
trable expression. He is a great diplomatist in 
public life, understanding by diplomacy the art 
of detecting, comprehending and turning to 
account the dispositions of others : no one has 
displayed this talent on the tribune, in so mas- 
terly a manner as Kossuth, and few r , therefore, 
have worked so powerfully on the hearts of his 
auditors. If it be said that he unites the talent 
of the actor with that of the orator, — a reproach 
which has often been made, — he must be called 
unquestionably a great actor. He has never 
strained after petty effects, nor tricked up the 
pictures of his oratory with finical touches of 
the pencil; but he carries away his audience 



48 



THE HUNGARIAN CONTROVERSY. 



by a just combination of reasoning and feeling. 
Whilst some orators would enforce conviction 
by the strict logical consequence of their argu- 
ment, and others seek to transport their listen- 
ers by an overpowering appeal to their feelings, 
Kossuth's eloquence consists in an alternation 
of effect, a magnificent blending of the two sys- 
tems. In this harmony lies the power of his 
oratory, and the certainty of his success. 

Whatever blame may be imputed to this re- 
markable man, no one has hitherto dared to 
attribute his actions to paltry or egotistical 
motives. He has invariably proved a true 
friend, and no mean spirit of revenge ever 
found access to his breast, or sprung up to check 
the free growth of his great virtues. Many of 
his early friends have at a later period separated 
from him, either from a feeling of mere envy, 
from political conviction, a fear of following out 
the consequences of his policy, motives of safety, 
or the like. But his honest, upright character 
was such, that his most dishonest enemies have 
never dared to assail it, except by secret and 
side attacks. 

Let any man travel at the present day from 



one end of Hungary to the other, and he will 
convince himself, perhaps to his surprise, that 
there is but one voice, one feeling respecting 
Kossuth, in the towns, on the landed estates of 
the nobility, and among the country people, — 
all revering him as the greatest, the most true- 
hearted patriot. An ignominious death has 
raised noteless persons to the rank of martyrs, 
and immortalized their names, — Kossuth will 
be worshipped as the martyr of his nation, with- 
out cross or gallows. He may pass his life in 
exile — be it even in outward comfort — whilst his 
countrymen at home are beggared, starved, im- 
prisoned, shot and hanged ; yet no Magyar will, 
in cool moments of reflection, charge Kossuth 
as the originator of the unspeakable misery that 
has befallen his country ; so deeply is he assured 
of the real causes of the blow under which 
Hungary has succumbed, so convinced is he of 
the greatness of Kossuth's character, and of the 
grief he suffers in exile for his beloved country. 
" God in his mercy be with him ! " — these are 
the Avords on the lips of every peasant in Hun- 
gary, since the disastrous termination of the 
struggle. 



Errata. On page 10, second column, ninth line from bottom, for " u 
On page 12, second column, twenty-ninth line from top, for " Arch&ts/i 



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